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Does BLP cover animals? Simply south ( talk) 23:12, 3 December 2010 (UTC)
Thanks for the replies. In that case how about a new guideline is created on the biographies or notabilities of individual animals? This is not a joke. Simply south ( talk) 16:38, 5 December 2010 (UTC)
It occurs to me that we may need something equivalent to WP:BLP in strength for articles on existing entities such as companies, corporations, and such. This edit is the one that got my attention. Imagine seeing something like that in a BLP; here we have an uncited assertion that the company murdered someone to shut them up. Aside from the obvious ethical issue of needing to get this stuff right, using verifiable, reliable sources -- entities such as this have considerable legal resources and such edits put us arguably at greater risk than a similar edit to the biography of an individual. In the example, the anon editor is essentially accusing the company of complicity in a murder. Do we need a "WP:BEC" ("existing companies") policy, or is Wikipedia:Libel sufficient? Note that BLP specifically states that it doesn't apply to companies and groups. Has this been discussed before? Antandrus (talk) 20:46, 5 December 2010 (UTC)
A new page, WP:Further reading, is under construction. Its purpose is to expand on the WP:FURTHER section of MOS:LAYOUT.
The MOS guideline currently says that ==Further reading== is "A bulleted list, usually alphabetized, of a reasonable number of editor-recommended publications that do not appear elsewhere in the article and were not used to verify article content."
Rjensen ( talk · contribs) would like to ditch the long-standing (2006?) rule about not normally listing sources in both the ==References== and ==Further reading== section of the same article. If you have an opinion or want to comment about how the community uses/should use this section, please join the current discussion. Thanks, WhatamIdoing ( talk) 20:52, 6 December 2010 (UTC)
Do the votes of unregistered users carry equal weight with those of registered users e.g. when discussing deletions or moves? -- Bermicourt ( talk) 17:53, 6 December 2010 (UTC)
The person who wrote the article about ^ group seems to be a heavy metal fan... go check out the article to see why :D
-K — Preceding unsigned comment added by Miss Jupiter ( talk • contribs) 16:23, 8 December 2010 (UTC)
As I have been working more in talk pages I have noticed a few things that I think need to be clarified and corrected regarding the assessment of certain classes of non-article items such as Categories, Templates, Disambiguation pages and Redirects.
1) Non-article items not tagged with an appropriate talk page banner:
2) Non-article items tagged with an incorrect assessment:
3) Non-article items tagged with an incorrect importance or priority:
Correctly identifying these things will allow visibility of them which is currently difficult at best. In the case of Redirects, there are a lot of redirects that exist because of accidental spelling errors or were created as a possible scenario link that is unlikely and tagging them will increase visibility of them so they can potentially be eliminated. -- Kumioko ( talk) 01:33, 6 December 2010 (UTC)
Kumioko, you say "I believe they should be tagged somehow and accounted for."
Why? What practical goal are you trying to achieve by spamming a WikiProject banner to the talk page of a {{ R from alternate spelling}} redirect? (Do you know why we have WikiProjects assess pages?) WhatamIdoing ( talk) 05:31, 6 December 2010 (UTC)
Generally, it's left to the WikiProjects themselves to determine what pages they want to incorporate into their scope. As to the incorrect assessments, one possibility would be to have the banner template automatically assess based on namespace where indicated. Would that address the concern? -- Bsherr ( talk) 06:00, 6 December 2010 (UTC)
Kumioko primarily seems worried that s/he'll get something deleted, and then some person who didn't know about the deletion discussion will come back and ask to have it restored at a later date, on the grounds that consensus can change, and thus Kumioko will have "lost" or wasted time. I think this is a really trivial problem: It happens every day for prod'd articles, and the world hasn't stopped spinning yet. Worrying about the occasional (what, one or two percent?) un-deletion request is really a waste of time and energy. WhatamIdoing ( talk) 23:10, 7 December 2010 (UTC)
Well that is one concern, but not the only one. Here is a better list of some concerns I have with these things not being tagged by something:
In general I just don't think we should have things scattered around in the shadows of WP completely unseen. If these things are needed and important enough to exist then they should be visible to the project. In the end if the project doesn't want to see them that's fine but as it is the majority of the active projects account for a lot of these things in one form or another. -- Kumioko ( talk) 02:11, 8 December 2010 (UTC)
Kumioko,
You're not talking sense. It's like you've already decided that you want to do this, so you're making up nonsensical reasons to support your decision. Here's your list of alleged benefits, with my comments.
If you want to find double redirects or badly formatted dab pages or empty categories, then just go find them! You don't need to spam wikiproject banners to do these things.
If you want me to support this kind of spam, then you need to identify a worthy goal that cannot be done without creating hundreds or thousands of new talk pages. WhatamIdoing ( talk) 21:52, 9 December 2010 (UTC)
Just wondered if I could get some more people to weigh in on this discussion. Thanks. -- Dorsal Axe 11:44, 9 December 2010 (UTC)
Hi, I have a problem with the article White Argentine. In the article I mentioned many people who are Argentine by birth and by option (they immigrated when they were children and stayed in Argetnina until their death, or they are now living there). All those people mentioned in the article are perfectly Caucasian by phenotype, and all have European/Middle Eastern ancestry. To see the names, check this older version of the article, for they are now removed. This is because some users appeared criticizing the article and alleging that mentioning all those persons without a source that explicitly define them as "White Argentine/Argentinian" was a breach to Wikipedia's BLP policy. Is that true? Because I read the article of WP policy on categorization by ethnicity, gender, religion and sexuality, and the topic "Race" is still under dispute. Besides, one of the users that criticizes the article is also involved in the proposal/discussion/RfC of the policy itself. If the matter isn't still resolved, can they apply a rule that it is not fully valid yet? If I provide sources that every living Argentine mentioned in the article is of predominantly European ancestry, isn't that enough to define him/her as White? Please, help me clarify this doubt.-- Pablozeta ( talk) 12:29, 9 December 2010 (UTC)
Is there a guideline or even rule of thumb that states a category should have a minimum no. of articles in order to avoid being deleted for being too small? My searches so far haven't found anything. -- Bermicourt ( talk) 21:58, 10 December 2010 (UTC)
Thanks folks, that's useful. I guess also if there are fewer than say five to eight articles in a category, a key question is whether the category is likely to grow in future. I also understand that numbers are not the only criterion in deciding whether a category should exist or not. -- Bermicourt ( talk) 19:57, 11 December 2010 (UTC)
There are currently 500+ images that I've listed at User:Smallman12q/DOE media which may be non-free, but tagged with a free license. Is it possible that the WMF could send a mass OTRS ticket to the the national laboratories to get permission for the images? Smallman12q ( talk) 22:11, 10 December 2010 (UTC)
Phan Thị Kim Phúc and many of the type and Wikileaks documents prove - US/European crimes are documented (sometimes produced) and disseminated, the totalitarian ones aren't. If you are against censorship, go to N-Korea and bring some photos. Xx236 ( talk) 11:20, 8 December 2010 (UTC)
Offer a General Discussion tab for all topics! Where else would be a better place to have meta-discussions? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.171.44.251 ( talk) 14:03, 10 December 2010 (UTC)
As yet another debate about the CoS kicks off at AN/I, can I propose that Wikipedia declares as a matter of policy that such topics are unequivocally boring. Personally, I find religion in general an interesting topic, as I do many social constructs, but frankly, the sort of debate that centres around Scientology seems so utterly vacuous, and doomed to sink into tit-for-tat Wikilawyering and half-baked sock-puppetry, that it isn't worth the attention. Can I therefore propose that a new template be created to warn the unwary that they are about to be suckered into reading tabloid theology and prepubescent conspiracy theories (from all participants - the CoS at least attempts to pretend to be serious), and that such debates are only of interest to the terminally obsessive? This might allow the uninvolved reader to read something of more use, like disputes over the translation of Manga characters' names into Swahili, or whether the North Pole moves around while you run in circles around it... AndyTheGrump ( talk) 05:47, 12 December 2010 (UTC)
|}
Can someone please point me to the definition of consensus, as it is used here at Wikipedia? Anthony ( talk) 16:44, 12 December 2010 (UTC)
Notice: I've posted a discussion on the wp:MERGE page's discussion page asking about how to determine when to create separate articles about both a criminal and the crime for which s/he is noted and when to combine them.-- Hodgson-Burnett's Secret Garden ( talk) 18:05, 12 December 2010 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Deceased Wikipedians/Guidelines ( | talk | history | links | watch | logs) has recently been edited to mark it as a guideline. This is an automated notice of the change ( more information). -- VeblenBot ( talk) 02:00, 14 December 2010 (UTC)
Wikipedia:WikiProject Aviation/Accident article notability ( | talk | history | links | watch | logs) has recently been edited to mark it as a guideline. This is an automated notice of the change ( more information). -- VeblenBot ( talk) 02:00, 10 December 2010 (UTC)
I seems like instruction creep to me. Also it's clearly a content guideline and not a notability guideline. Taemyr ( talk) 17:14, 11 December 2010 (UTC)
More broadly speaking, there are 22 pages in the category Category:WikiProject Aviation guidelines, and I've been wondering whether or not these pages are claiming to be "guidelines" in the official sense of the word? It appears that most of them were written by a single editor ( Trevor MacInnis), and they are often cited as representing consensus (I have recently questioned this point here). Is it okay for them to be using the word "guideline" in this case? Thanks, Mlm42 ( talk) 21:20, 13 December 2010 (UTC)
On Talk:Pain, Anthonyhcole ( talk · contribs) defends the non-use of citation templates with the observation that apparently adding these can increase page load time by 50%. [1] I know the use of citation templates is not mandatory, but I have never seen this as an argument not to use a particular feature. I was wondering if there was a policy about this somewhere, and what others thought about this line of reasoning. JFW | T@lk 08:50, 12 December 2010 (UTC)
ref=harv
mechanism. The first=
/last=
system is necessary for that. And of course {{
harv}}, {{
sfn}}, et al. are beneficial for articles where multiple pages of the same single source are used. Not least because they reduce the number of times that one has to employ the same citation template over and over! There's a huge helping of irony, here, more on which below.
Uncle G (
talk) 00:09, 14 December 2010 (UTC)I looked through the history of the article, and it appears that the article Pain has an established style that uses cite templates. In any case, the established style should be preserved and whoever tried to change it should be handed a trout for starting the same conversation again. The general rule, as SlimVirgin says, is that the established style should be kept. There is no consensus wiki-wide about whether template citations, or non-template citations, are superior. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 22:25, 12 December 2010 (UTC)
This conversation is happening at two locations, here and Talk:Pain#Cite_ref. I am the editor arguing for handwritten citations on the article Pain and - for ease of following and to avoid duplication - I'm restricting my comments to that venue. Anthony ( talk) 04:35, 13 December 2010 (UTC)
The irony of the discussion here, especially what Jfdwolff writes above about not using first=
/last=
, is that looking at
Pain#References I see at least one source cited multiple times just to employ different page numbers and several other sources cited with ranges of pages encompassing the entire source work, where the exact page number(s) supporting the content are not given. The irony is that instead actually using first=
/last=
, in conjunction with either {{
sfn}} or {{
harvnb}} (neither of which employ meta-templates and lots of parameters, note), would for starters reduce the number of citations of one of the sources from six instances of {{
cite book}} to just one, and allow the provision of the specific page numbers for several others.
Uncle G (
talk) 00:09, 14 December 2010 (UTC)
Also, you can worry about performance if you can tell the difference yourself. If you find that a page takes ten seconds to load, and takes only one second to load if you remove a particular template, and you can reliably reproduce this and other editors confirm they can too, then obviously the template is slowing down that page. If you would like the page to load faster, then by all means remove or simplify the template. (Bold in original.)
Background of problem - A recent bot run by User:VWBot to revert hundreds of edits made to articles has, I believe, overstepped the bounds of how we should treat articles that have been edited by copyright violators. In this case, several hundred articles were reverted to a state prior to being edited by Accotink2, a known Sockpuppeteer and who was known to violate copyright on several occassions. The problem with this case, and I suspect others as well, is that this editor also made a lot of good improvements to articles such as adding references or citations. The bot however, based on current policy, assumed that every edit the user ever made was a copyright violation and reverted a lot of articles that didn't need to be reverted. This had/caused several problems:
Its this last point that I want to draw attention too because I think this is the root of the problems we are facing with this bot run and with the overtasked nature of the project in general. I don't think that its necessary to directly assume that all edits are copyvios and I think we can make some logic to filter out some of them out getting to the ones that truly are the problem.
Recommendation - I think if we tweak the wording slightly it will reduce some of the workload of the project, it will reduce the unneeded reversions and will still meet the end result of making sure the Copy violation information has been eliminated. I think there are occasions were we can reasonably assume (although admittedly not 100%) that the violators actions were not harmful or that they have been overcome by events. Here are some things I think we should incorporate into the wording:
All three of the above suggestions could be "filtered and monitored" by a bot but I don't think that the bot should necessarily make changes to the article. I don't know exactly how this should be worded or incorporated but I think this would both cut down on the amount of articles that need to be reviewed and clarify the unnecessarily absolute and heavy handed wording of the currently policy. -- Kumioko ( talk) 15:04, 11 December 2010 (UTC)
Actually I might have a proposed change for the policy. Currently it says major contributions. I would suggest changing this to creative contributions. Major appears to refer to the size of a contribution, but as you are well aware copyvio's have been found in edits of slightly more than 100 bytes. Also edits such as creating tables, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(policy)infoboxes and reference addition can be massive in size, but are not creative work and can't be copyvios. Yoenit ( talk) 21:10, 11 December 2010 (UTC)
I was under the impression that WP:ROOT was rejected. However, WP:OUTLINE looks to be exactly the same thing and there is a veritable forest of "Outline of" articles in this encyclopedia. [2] Was there discussion about this that allows outline pages but not root pages? ( this confusing discussion is the closest I could find.) If not, should some or all of these outline pages be deleted? A great deal of them look like synthetic amalgams better suited to something like DMOZ.
jps ( talk) 04:28, 13 December 2010 (UTC)
Surely it is not right that the standard FPC template refers to a "voting period" ? ╟─ Treasury Tag► constablewick─╢ 08:51, 24 November 2010 (UTC)
I know this has been brought up before. Probably repeatedly. I don't care. It's becoming increasingly insulting that, despite having closed the banner multiple times, Jimmy Wales continues to bug me for money:
“ | I'm a volunteer.
I don't get paid a cent for my work at Wikipedia, and neither do our thousands of other volunteer authors and editors. |
” |
Likewise, James Jimmy. I've given countless hours of my time researching, writing, and maintaining thousands and thousands of articles and images for Wikipedia over the last six years, not to mention the time I've put in protecting the articles from vandalism, or maintaining the processes of the site.
Yet, for some reason, he keeps reappearing to bug me for money. I don't recall ever having been paid a cent for my work here, work that has undoubtedly improved the site's standing with people who WOULD pay a cent. I, and many other thousands like me, are exactly the reasons WHY people will donate to Wikipedia. Because of our hard work, Wikipedia exists and needs money to continue existing. Just don't insult me by taking my labor for free, willingly offered and delivered, and then having the gall to ask me to donate further, after I politely said "no" by clicking the X. I'm getting tired of it.
There's two possibilities here, both annoying but only one malicious: either the programmers are so inept as to be unable to code the site to remember who has closed the banner, or someone is consciously restoring the banner ad to those who have closed it. I rather like the coders, so I hope that is not the situation, which leaves open the malicious option of someone choosing to annoy the kind volunteers of this site whom have already expressed no desire to donate at this time. This seems much more likely than inept programmers.
So here's a policy request: When someone closes a banner, don't roll your eyes and throw that out. Respect your users well enough to stop displaying it when they have closed it.
I will not be donating money to Wikipedia; stop asking. Haven't I donated enough already? -- Golbez ( talk) 20:05, 16 December 2010 (UTC)
An "admin", posted on a front page discussion that I was violating personal attack rules. This is right. But what was also right, he was exercising double standards. This is because I was defending myself against someone that explicitly, clearly and unequivocally said that I blame ALL wikipedians to be Fascists (while that was ridiculous since I'm also a wikipedians since I post here. I clearly meant specific ones). He never said that to him. He let him attacking me. That was also done by someone else below him. Someone else tried to find "evidence" that I blame ALL wikipedians to be fascist. He never said anything to him either. I suppose, to be allowed here to do personal attacks, act like a gang and destroy discussion with bullying, you have to be "polite" about it. Just like how the British Empire would slaughter people in African Colonies. "But we are polite at least!". Hypocrites. -- Leladax ( talk) 07:22, 18 December 2010 (UTC)
This was discussed briefly above, but I'd like to start a new section because my concern is more broad than the specific guideline which was being discussed. Many WikiProjects have their own guidelines and style guides, created to ensure consistency across a large class of articles. I think this is a good idea. But there is a problem: A WikiProject guideline could be written by a single editor with no prior discussion, and possibly without consensus. Existing tags, such as {{ essay}}, or {{ Draft proposal}} seem inappropriate (and, indeed, are rarely on such guidelines).. and with no tags, editors may come across a WikiProject guideline page and think there is wide consensus on its contents (as is the case for real guidelines).. not realizing it was written by some guy four years ago with no prior discussion!
So I'd like to propose the use of a yet-to-be-created tag (maybe called {{ WikiProject Guideline}}) which lets readers know the guideline may only be supported in it's entirety by a small number of editors, and possibly encourages further discussions. Of course, some specific issues in WikiProject guidelines have, no doubt, been discussed at length; so I think it would be nice if WikiProject guidelines were to include in-line citations of these discussions, to emphasize which points in fact do have broad consensus.. maybe in-line references to discussions could also be encouraged in such a tag. Does that sound like a good idea? Mlm42 ( talk) 00:52, 16 December 2010 (UTC)
I think we should make an "deleted page archive" type of thing, that archives deleted articles, excep those who are appearant vandalism and libel. Some people will have a trivial interest in looking at old articles, and it could be user for reference matters at a later time. MikeNicho231 ( talk) 15:35, 17 December 2010 (UTC)
Based on what I've encountered in WP:ANI and other noticeboards, I'd like to suggest the following policy under the name WP:NOBOOMERANG:
I would appreciate any comments, particularly constructive ones. Dylan Flaherty 19:57, 14 December 2010 (UTC)
Let me try to accommodate your points:
Version 2:
For your convenience, here's the diff. Please let me know if this resolves your concerns. Dylan Flaherty 21:56, 14 December 2010 (UTC)
I make no attempt to defend the marketing. :-) The current dispute resolution process also depends on people agreeing. For example, agreeing that someone violated a rule. My core suggestion is that we make it standard to at least ask whether a new topic is relevant. Right now, this seemingly obvious question doesn't come up, and attempts to bring it up are taken as hostile. That's the deep problem here. Dylan Flaherty 19:49, 15 December 2010 (UTC)
My proposed wording for NOBOOMERANG. Do not act in a manner that will give other users opportunity to use an unrelated retaliatory argument against you if you have reason to bring a situation to WP:ANI or other noticeboards. Seriously... -- Onorem ♠ Dil 00:13, 16 December 2010 (UTC)
Not to put too fine a point on it, but this is more of a modification of existing rules than an addition. Dylan Flaherty 18:31, 16 December 2010 (UTC)
I love Wikipedia. Or, more accurately, I love the IDEA of Wikipedia. I used to devote/volunteer upwards 30 to 40 hours a week to creating new and editing entries. That's as much as a paying job. And when I wasn't doing that, I was usually surfing the articles. I would sometimes find myself on a page and have to keep hitting the back button just to follow the "cyber trail" back to where it started, often laughing at just how esoteric the path was.
But I also kept getting frustrated and pissed off over inane, pointless edit conflicts where some bozo calling himself "Lord Zoltran" would come in after hours of work on a subject and with a single keystroke wipe it out while arrogantly claiming the rationale that it wasn't encyclopedic enough. I watched as many other smart, informed and dedicated editors would finally just give up and decide they had better things to do with their valuable time than deal with these types. Worst, they didn't seem to be any sort of real help from the staff to settle these things.
Much I felt stemmed from the the "good on paper, terrible in practice" idea that people could be anonymous. Fine if said editor was in Nepal, but not those of us in most Western Democracies. Does someone really need to protect their identity to edit the article on Banana Slugs??? Yet, there's Darth Sidious 2, TwistofCain and Diannaa in the history. It's even more questionable when it comes to those given the status of senior editors (been so long, can't remember the Wiki lingo for them) or Sysops.
And the type of people who were being driven out by this nonsense were exactly the type of person who gives money to Wikipedia. For last several years, I couldn't afford to donate to any of my favorite organizations. Now, I'm finally in fiscal position that makes it possible again, yet I hesitate greatly when it comes to heeding the appeal banners.
Something to consider when you look at that donation bar that is only half-way to the goal... RoyBatty42 ( talk) 03:33, 17 December 2010 (UTC)
It is certainly true that only 10% or less of admins have "human" names - and who can say which of those are real? I am aware a number of people regret not using their "real name" and I think it might be more healthy. There is evidence (proper scientific research) that people behave worse when afforded cyber-anonymity, particularly in respect to cyber-bullying. Nonetheless, there are valuable aspects to anonymity too, I have seen may threats on Wikipedia, and more, and more violent ones on other fora, while I have not been on the receiving end of any, I can understand peoples reluctance to use their own name.
Rich
Farmbrough, 08:18, 20 December 2010 (UTC).
I think wikipedia is one of the greatest contributions to mankind.and at the same time i feel that such a noble thing should not fall short of money in anyway.to ensure this i urge upon to you to have sustainable commercial exposure in the webpage which will create a fund required for the existance,maintenance,research and developement of this great effort.of course donation will also continue.the commercials may be selective that will not deter the main effort.seeing the angel like face of mr. jimmy wales,i feel that we cannot let wikipedia to wash off only for monetary crisis which is very much visible in this sort of noble works.long live jimmy wales,long live wikipedia. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 123.49.58.58 ( talk) 18:52, 20 December 2010 (UTC)
An issue has been brewing over what constitutes a bot or bot type edit and we need to get this situation resolved so I am bringing it here for discussion.
Background: Rich Farmbrough has been consistently blocked and badgered over his high speed edits using AWB and was recently blocked for 48 hours by RD232 because he determined that Rich's creation of 300 articles using AWB constituted a breach of bot policy as a "bot-type" edit.
Clarification needed: There are a couple of items that need to be clarified here relating to Wikipedia:Bot_policy#Mass_article_creation
[My block is irrelevant to this btw. I raised the issue at BOTPOL before that happened, and was not blocked under this provision.]
OK, the thing is
WP:MEATBOT is exactly what is being challenged here. That and confusion over the various "bot-like" aspects of behaviour. My contention is that MEATBOT is creating problems for the future, while simply saying "apply the DUCK test to edits" seems an easy fix, in fact it moves the contention to whether DUCK is passed. If this is by fiat of BAG then BAG may define anyone to be a bot and hence subject to BAGPOL. While I don't suggest that this will be abused, it is bad policy. If it is by consensus discussion, then not only have we not resolved the problem that MEATBOT is intended to solve but if we err in one direction we alienate editors, if we err in the other cases are thrown back to the human editing rules, which therefore need to be able to deal with them (and usually, and historically can). Essentially the reason to stop something happening is because it's a bad idea, not because it's being done in a way that is reminiscent of a bot. And that does not mean speed - I (for example) have been chastised on that very basis "It's not the speed it's the bot-like nature of the edits." BOTPOL/BAG/BRFAs have done a great job in getting productive bots accepted by the community (despite shortfalls and various widely publicised incidents), there is, however, no reason to think that extending their purview to human editing ha any merit.
Rich
Farmbrough, 15:04, 19 December 2010 (UTC).
I agree with Jim Miller and Yoenit that the WikiProject talk page banners provide valuable information about the state of the article. Not just to the project but to others who may be interested in working on that article or topic. Having a blue linked talk page, even if only a banner for a project, is better than a red link. Red links are bad. They look uninviting and make the article appear as though its been abandoned in the wastelands of WP. There are a couple reasons why a blue linked talk page are better than a redlinked one. We definately don't need to be bot deleting them.
I just wonder, does being the child of a famous person(s) make you notable for Wikipedia? I think it should'nt be that way, as having a famous parent(s) does not automatically make that person famous. MikeNicho231 ( talk) 21:11, 19 December 2010 (UTC)
Is it normal to add copyright by-lines to images as done in the photograph in Posy Simmonds? I thought we didn't do that on Wikipedia but don't have a guideline to hand saying that. WP:WATERMARK seems to almost, but not quite, say it. SpinningSpark 15:01, 21 December 2010 (UTC)
Not sure who is responding to what but overall:
The key question was this "Is it normal to add copyright by-lines to images as done in the photograph..." And the answer, for anyone in the real world, is "Yes. It is not only normal but expected. To those in the industry the answer is "In most cases it is explicit in the rights usage and is most likely spelled out in the contract/license/agreement." In Wikiworld it is just a "personal and idiosyncratic interpretation" where the real world is "irrelevant." Take your pick. Soundvisions1 ( talk) 22:47, 21 December 2010 (UTC)
If You Distribute, or Publicly Perform the Work or any Adaptations or Collections, You must [...] keep intact all copyright notices for the Work and provide, reasonable to the medium or means You are utilizing: (i) the name of the Original Author [...]; and, (iv) consistent with Section 3(b), in the case of an Adaptation, a credit identifying the use of the Work in the Adaptation [...].
The credit required by this Section 4(d) may be implemented in any reasonable manner; provided, however, that in the case of a Adaptation or Collection, at a minimum such credit will appear, if a credit for all contributing authors of the Adaptation or Collection appears, then as part of these credits and in a manner at least as prominent as the credits for the other contributing authors.
If You Distribute, or Publicly Perform the Work or any Adaptations or Collections, You must [...] keep intact all copyright notices for the Work and provide, reasonable to the medium or means You are utilizing: (i) the name of the Original Author [...]; and, (iv) consistent with Section 3(b), in the case of an Adaptation, a credit identifying the use of the Work in the Adaptation [...].
The credit required by this Section 4(d) may be implemented in any reasonable manner; provided, however, that in the case of a Adaptation or Collection, at a minimum such credit will appear, if a credit for all contributing authors of the Adaptation or Collection appears, then as part of these credits and in a manner at least as prominent as the credits for the other contributing authors.
Wikipedia:Notability (geography) ( | talk | history | links | watch | logs) has recently been edited to mark it as a guideline. This is an automated notice of the change ( more information). -- VeblenBot ( talk) 02:00, 22 December 2010 (UTC)
in over two and half years... |
the glib and the glaring
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The nutshell is that we're an encyclopedia and we're not paper. Topics such as a real place, a real river are inherently things we should be covering. The id:articles that were n-tagged need work; they're mostly little stubs. That's how articles start.</opinion>
Boring admin collapses rather silly discussion
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Fences& Windows 02:36, 21 December 2010 (UTC)
I've seen plenty of edit summaries with dirty words, but until today I never saw one get oversighted. I just happened to click on a link for a diff when the offensive edit summary still existed. By the time the diff came up, the edit summary had a line through it, which I recognized as oversight, which I saw for the first time after requesting the removal of someone's personal information.
In looking at the contributions of some vandals, I saw this again and again. One blocked vandal had a contributions list consisting entirely of oversighted edit summaries. Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 22:17, 22 December 2010 (UTC)
So back to my original question--what does it take before an edit summary itself is deleted? Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 16:46, 25 December 2010 (UTC)
It's reasonable to assume that an IP which hasn't had a talk page warning in two years is not even the same person. The previous warning said the IP would be blocked for the next vandalism, but that didn't happen for two years.
I've seen guidelines on this somewhere, but I don't remember where. Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 16:59, 25 December 2010 (UTC)
Should Wikipedia:Namespace be promoted to a guideline? Join the discussion at Wikipedia talk:Namespace#Promote to guideline. Regards -- Bsherr ( talk) 20:24, 25 December 2010 (UTC)
I have long been mystified by the doctrine that 'original research' is deemed to be fault in a Wikipedia article. In the wider world of learning, excavating truths from primary sources - in which, perhaps, only an uncommon mind and an equally uncommon diligence could have perceived them - is usually considered a far higher form of activity than merely rearranging and recycling what is already known. It seems willfully perverse of the Wikipedia administration to reverse this attitude and actually to bar the deepest thinkers and the most devoted scholars from its pages, as if they stood on a par with bigots, charlatans and commercial hirelings.
Perhaps this principle was intended as a restraint on the insertion of 'facts' which are based on unverifiable authority or no authority at all. This is certainly a persistent problem, and it is entirely understandable that the administrators should wish to install safeguards against it; but is the present formulation of the law truly the best way of doing so? It seems to me that, as long as a statement of fact is supported by a properly specified and verifiable source - one which third parties can consult for themselves, either because it is in printed circulation or because, if it consists of a manuscript, it is held by a public or academic library or else can be viewed in facsimile in printed material or online - then that statement is entirely worthy of insertion in Wikipedia; it should not matter in the least that the writer of the article has himself or herself discovered the source, as opposed to learning about it from some other work of reference. (The same applies to cases where the source is non-verbal, e.g. where it consists of a building or a natural object. The point is that, here too, others can inspect the source and satisfy themselves that it exists and that it justifies the conclusions drawn from it by the writer.) In short, primary sources should be as admissible as any other, provided they can be validated. Speculation and unsupported assertion are faults; 'original research' is neither the one nor the other, and is no fault at all.
Is there any hope that this issue can be reconsidered? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Oliver Mundy ( talk • contribs) 17:26, 22 December 2010 (UTC)
For the original poster: there is some use for OR in Wikipedia. OR cannot be included in the encyclopedia, but OR can be effective in deciding that some bit of information should be excluded. As writers and editors we use OR everyday and it always appears on talk page discussions, about content. While it is a key point of the verifiability policy that truth is not an issue, verifiability is, we also make common sense editorial decisions that verifiable bits of information that conflict with truth can be excluded, often using OR to make that decision. SchmuckyTheCat ( talk)
Go to the article on Lie algebra and start removing uncited stuff, and see what happens. The problem is that the policy pages of wikipedia, WP:V first and foremost, don't actually describe how Wikipedia is ACTUALLY written. I'm sorry about that, but it's the truth. Do I need a citation for it? S B H arris 02:35, 24 December 2010 (UTC)The real vector space of all n × n skew-hermitian matrices is closed under the commutator and forms a real Lie algebra denoted . This is the Lie algebra of the unitary group U(n).
This is not hypothetical. Just to take an example that affected many lives (it's probably the single most believed evidence that pushed the US public into supporting the 2003 Iraq war), see the article on Iraqi aluminum tubes. Just as the NYT was loudly claiming in late 2002 that the government was telling them that these tubes could not be used for anything other than nuclear programs, everybody from the Sec Def to Sec State to the VP and the President was saying the same. But-- none of them gave THEIR sources. So what is there to "verify"? If you look here (Oct 3, 2004, NYT): [3] it appears that the DOE knew in 2001 that Iraq was using these same tubes for rockets, with the exact same specs, and had been for years. But one guy in the CIA who had once worked for DOE years before, didn't believe it, and he was the source for the idea that these things had no other believable use but for uranium enrichment. But (alas) the government didn't tell anybody before the 2003 war that only one guy named Joe at the CIA had this idea, and that it was already known as of May, 2001, that Iraq was using exactly these tubes, same specs, for rockets. No mystery. And the government also knew that the other people at DOE who were uranium enrichment experts didn't think the tubes would be good for the job (these people did NOT know that they were already being used in rockets by Iraq). This info was kept that info from Colin Powell himself, because he'd never have been able to face the U.N. with a straight face, saying as an old military man that he couldn't imagine Iraqi weapons specs were so good for mere one-time anti-tank weapons. So-- all this comes back to the idea of what is a "reliable source" for information. Is the NYT a reliable source for the military uses of aluminum tubes of a certain type, in 2002? Clearly, no. Is the CIA? Clearly, no. (Not that the CIA is talking). Is the US government realiable? Clearly, no. The actual experts on gas enrichment won't talk, and they don't publish on this question in open forums.
Wikipedia, were it doing what it is supposed to be doing, would have concluded in 2002 that none of the sources it actually had for this information were reliable. In context, none are appropriate. So where is our "verifiablity"? Who do we ask who knows what they are talking about? Is the NYT reliable in 2004, but wasn't 2002? Quite possibly. Or, is it reliable on this matter, even now? And how would WE know? I'm merely using this matter as an example-- I don't want to go into a discussion about the 2003 Iraq war, rather I want to use this bit as a springboard to discuss issues of sourcing and reliability. If it's so simple a matter, just explain to me how WP's WP:V and WP:IRS policies would or should have dealt with this particular issue, in February, 2003. S B H arris 06:07, 24 December 2010 (UTC)
As a bi of aside, it is interesting that no original research was one of the first policies on Nupedia, although, as I recall, (I have a source covering this, but would need to dig it up), the reasoning was a tad different. Nupedia was to be developed by experts (including academics), and naturally original research is part of what they do, so the rule was in place to prevent them pushing their own pet theories. Which makes sense from the point of view of an encyclopedia, which should be a neutral retelling of current research, rather than a chance to present new work. Now I agree with the above statements: the main advantage is limit content to verifiable material, which is an essential process when you move away from a reliance on acknowledged experts in a field to people who may lack the expertise, as you can no longer rely on the author as a viable source, and instead need to rely on where the author gained the information. - Bilby ( talk) 13:17, 24 December 2010 (UTC)
The simple reason is that Wikipedia is not a publisher of original thought--it's a compendium of all documented knowledge. Others do the original research and we cite them. WesleyDodds ( talk) 09:50, 28 December 2010 (UTC)
Excuse me for the following sarcastic comment. Its been almost 3 months so its time for another weeks long discussion on the status of Find a grave. Here is a link to the discussion that is currently taking place, Again. on the external links noticeboard. Find a grave and IMDB.-- Kumioko ( talk) 15:10, 25 December 2010 (UTC)
A vote is currently being held at Wikipedia:External links/Noticeboard as to wether we should ban the use of the Find a grave site and remove the thousands of links we have to it on articles. Please take a moment and place your vote. -- Kumioko ( talk) 16:14, 29 December 2010 (UTC)
Wouldn't this be forum shopping? I brought up the question at the link above. It is my first time asking about it and the discussion imho is going quite well. There needs to be an end to this question about these two sites if it is questioned every few months by different editors. One problem I see is and I'm not the only one, is that there are inconsistancies the way we handle both of these sites. Having these sites spammed to multiple articles like they are is shameful. They are put in EL whether they bring info to the articles or not. There are other sites too that are constistantly added to EL that usually bring the same material as our articles have plus what other EL's have. This was just recently put together. As you can see, nothing is consistant in these sites that are added. I thought Facebook and Twitter were both not acceptable links anywhere now this new site says they are, sometimes. What is going on here? I'd appreciate some clarifications at this point. I went to the wrong place to ask these questions, and other questions, please advice me where the best place would be. My personal opinion is that both sites should be white listed, so should I go there with my opinions and see what is said there? I'd really appreciate any help I can get on this because sections like EL and Filmography are getting quite messy and the rules are getting strangely inconsistant. Thanks if advance, -- CrohnieGal Talk 21:27, 29 December 2010 (UTC)
Hi all.
First of all, I'm aware this is probably the wrong place to ask this question. In my own defence, I would suggest this is the right place to ask for the right place to ask this question. Please feel free to advise me where I might move it to a more appropriate place; I would also most appreciate your feedback about this and any other possible... If this is the wrong place, just move it to the right place.
The current {{subst:uw-username}} template generates
Hello, and welcome to Wikipedia. I noticed that your username (foo) may not meet Wikipedia's username policy. If you believe that your username does not violate our policy, please leave a note here explaining why. As an alternative, you may file for a change of username, or you may simply create a new account and use that for editing. Thank you.
To my ear, "you may file for a change of username" sounds like legalese, like there's some sort of legal process involved: pleadings, documents in triplicate "indorsed" and served, subpoenas and prolly lots more. Just one simple change would ameliorate all this. How about
Hello, and welcome to Wikipedia. I noticed that your username (foo) may not meet Wikipedia's username policy. If you believe that your username does not violate our policy, please leave a note here explaining why. As an alternative, you may ask for a change of username, or you may simply create a new account and use that for editing. Thank you.
Just sayin'-- Shirt58 ( talk) 11:54, 28 December 2010 (UTC)
I'm curious about at template, Template:Metlink Display. It is designed to display the bus route, times of operations, and bus company in Melbourne, Australia articles. For example, the Melbourne Airport is served by 4 different bus routes, and includes these in the text after discussing public transport.
A shopping mall article contained this list of buses, including a broken template:
{{Metlink Display|201}} {{Metlink Display|205}} {{Metlink Display|207}} {{Metlink Display|279}} {{Metlink Display|280}} {{Metlink Display|281}} {{Metlink Display|282}} {{Metlink Display|284}} {{Metlink Display|285}} {{Metlink Display|293}} {{Metlink Display|295}} {{Metlink Display|305}} {{Metlink Display|307}} {{Metlink Display|902}} {{Metlink Display|903}}
The display template includes links to other templates coded to fill all of the parameters. For example, the Timetable template holds 347 external links to www.metlinkmelbourne.com.au routes. The origin, destination and hours templates wikilink the same number, 300+, of articles in a switch to provide these parameters according to the timetable. There's a via template with another huge switch that will then list the route cities, hundreds of parameters in a list for type (circular, clockwise, etc.), then finally another switch template with hundreds of bus operators.
I deleted them in one article, the list above, as it seems inappropriate to display huge lists of bus routes to destinations in urban areas. It's not really the purpose of an encyclopedia, but of a tourist guide to a city. Then, when I looked at the template, it turns out many articles link to it.
Do these really belong in wikipedia articles? And, haven't we essentially downloaded the bus routes and time-tables to wikipedia? Do we need permission? -- Kleopatra ( talk) 06:13, 30 December 2010 (UTC)
I have been concerned about the addition of unsourced geographical coordinate information to articles for some time. Now, it has reached a new level with a bot adding unsourced geocoordinates to a massive number of articles. Most of these geocoord edits fall into the realm of original research with some editors going so far as to search databases for features with similar sounding names (see one such discussion here). The bot appears to be using coordinates from interwiki articles which are unsourced. I am not too worried about adding geocoords for locations which are public and protected; but, some geographic locations are sensitive. They may be located on private property; have sensitive, fragile, valuable resources and be extremely difficult or impossible to protect. Publishing geocoordinates for these sensitive locations is highly irresponsible and serves to tempt (in the vein of the familiar essay WP:BEANS) the unprepared, the ignorant and possibly the unscrupulous to trespass, and to possibly do great damage to a valuable cultural or private resource. While WP:NOR and WP:V clearly cover it, some editors (and even some bot ops) seem willing to use maps, databases, unsourced interwiki articles, or even GPS devices to add coordinates to articles which are otherwise not verifiable from reliable sources. I would like to see more editors enforcing policy and removing unsourced geocoordinates especially from sensitive locations. I have brought this here to bring wider attention to the problem. Thanks and comments? WTucker ( talk) 02:45, 31 December 2010 (UTC)
Hello! I'm the bot operator behind the bot making these edits. Of course, I'm sure it was merely an oversight on WTucker's part not to inform me about this discussion, but I would have certainly greatly appreciated if if they had done so. I'll try to read the above when I have a moment, and respond. -- The Anome ( talk) 15:14, 31 December 2010 (UTC)
OK. I've had a chance to read the above. Firstly, I'd like to say that Tagishsimon has already said most of what I wanted to say, and other commenters have said much of the rest.
I'd just add a few more points to clarify my stance on this:
Finally, if WTucker really wishes to remove this information, they can do so on all the various relevant interwiki'd articles, and the bot will not put any it back again. -- The Anome ( talk) 15:28, 31 December 2010 (UTC)
Which article are we talking about? I was able to look up the location of Conkling Cavern in the GNIS system with no difficulty, so that particular set of coordinates is neither unsourcable nor secret. The information provded by the GNIS was:
Conklings Cave, ID: 916143, Class: Mine, County: Doña Ana, State: NM, Latitude: 321124N, Longitude: 1063507W, Elevation: 4806, Map: Bishop Cap
— Carl ( CBM · talk) 19:55, 31 December 2010 (UTC)
WT has vouchsafed as as follows: "I have defended a few sensitive locations and have been successful at having some edits oversighted", but I see no policy supporting such actions. Nor, from the example of Conkling Cavern, any mention whatsoever on the talk page of the application of the non-existent policy on suppressing geo-codes. I'm troubled that an editor has set himself up as the authority on suppression of geocoords for a subset of articles, with little or no transparancy nor any accountability. I'm troubled, too, that in the one example for which we have most of the information to our fingertips, Conkling Cavern, the coordinate is, as Carl shows, above, easily accessible and in the public domain. It is difficult to understand why, under such circumstances, we would not publish this coordinate; and it is easy to suspect that other of the suppressed coordinates are of the same ilk: in the public domain, easily accessible from USGS, missing from wikipedia merely on the (however well meant) whim of WT.
Whereas WT and I may well disagree as to which geo-locatable subjects should not have coordinates, I'm prepared to accept that the possibility exists that there may be articles for which suppression of the coords is, on the whole, desirable.
I'm not prepared to accept that suppression of such coords be done in the way in which WT seems to be going about it - with nil or minimal attempt to gain consensus for the suppression, with no community oversight, with no disclosure on the article talk page.
If it is to be done, let us do it out in the open, so that we can all see what's going on. Let us declare in the talk page that the coordinate has been suppressed, state the reason and record the consensus. Let us not suppress unless we can show consensus. Let us put the articles into a (perhaps hidden) category so that we have a central location at which all such articles are listed.
I invite WT to start this process by notifying us to the articles on which coordinates have been suppressed, so that each can be considered by the comunity, and the actions taken recorded on the talk page of each.
To the extent that any policy change is required, I suggest that it be on the lines set out above: that we handle the suppression of publication of information in a very public way. -- Tagishsimon (talk) 22:20, 31 December 2010 (UTC)
Let's start with Lechuguilla Cave as that is one that the bot copied unsourced from an interwiki with no citation. As far as I can tell, coordinates for this cave are not available through GNIS. The cave is on National Park Service property and access is strictly controlled. It is deemed "significant" according to the Federal Cave Resources Protection Act and you will be hard pressed to find a NPS employee who will give you coordinates for it openly. I have never seen the coordinates published in a reliable source, just general location descriptions. The cave is well known and clearly notable so an article on WP is appropriate but coordinates are not appropriate. If it is possible to mark an article with a hidden category or something like that to prevent coordinates, this is where I would start and I was able to get an edit oversighted on this article some time back albeit with some effort. Verifiability would be difficult without visiting the site with a GPS device but I see that as something along the lines of conducting a scientific experiment to verify a statement -- in other words, OR. WTucker ( talk) 01:18, 1 January 2011 (UTC)
I have started a thread at Wikipedia talk:Revision deletion#Environmentally sensitive locations about edits when there are no reliable sources. I think that there are really two different questions here:
If we conflate these two issues, it will lead to a lot of talking past each other, I think. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 02:37, 1 January 2011 (UTC)
Wikipedia:WikiProject Aviation/Accident article notability ( | talk | history | links | watch | logs) has been edited so that it is no longer marked as a guideline. It was previously marked as a guideline. This is an automated notice of the change ( more information). -- VeblenBot ( talk) 02:00, 1 January 2011 (UTC)
Thoughts re: possible policy change on how this is done. When an image is removed from a page, many editors at various experience levels work with it, most not being the original uploader. Newer users may not know that a rationale is needed and/or how to go about providing it to get the image back. It's possible for these images to fall into "redlink" in backlog and be deleted because of lack of a rationale. If the policy was to place a notice on the article's talk page with notice to all what's needed and that the image may be deleted in X number of days if not done, it would seem to give all who edit a page adequate opportunity to correct the problem. (first try at this so please excuse any mistakes) We hope ( talk) 17:52, 1 January 2011 (UTC)
Wikipedia:WikiProject Aviation/Aircraft accidents and incidents ( | talk | history | links | watch | logs) has recently been edited to mark it as a guideline. This is an automated notice of the change ( more information). -- VeblenBot ( talk) 02:00, 1 January 2011 (UTC)
I've opened an RFC to determine what the current consensus is on the use of non-free cover images on articles of copyrighted works per current treated of the non-free content criteria policy. The RFC can be found at WT:NFC#Appropriateness of cover images per NFCC#8. -- MASEM ( t) 16:50, 3 January 2011 (UTC)
I'd like to persuade a professional body to pay an expert to edit some medical articles and review them twice a year, but there seem to be conflicting views about the appropriateness of this. My view is that, provided they follow WP:V, WP:RS and the other essential policies, there is nothing to prevent paid editing. Am I wrong? Anthony ( talk) 07:59, 2 January 2011 (UTC)
I think it would be beneficial to allow Talk pages to be used for the discussion of the content of articles, as well as just their maintenance. By this I mean not only discussing problems in formatting, citations, etc. but also what the article is talking about, e.g. people's opinions on and arguments about the pros and cons of certain philosophies.
I say this because I spend a lot of time reading philosophy articles, specifically ethics, and I think that in this field especially Wikipedia could allow for excellent discussion and advancement of thought in certain areas. Sometimes on these articles I see [by whom] or similar superscripts (indicating `weasel words' I believe. I apologise for my lack of knowledge as I'm not a contributor.) next to certain points, which aren't necessarily in need of a citation: they are points that are perfectly valid and could be attributed to the contributor. It appears that points are only likely to be added to an article if they can be referenced to an external source and/or if the author is famous or an expert in their field, when many points just as worthy could come from Wikipedia's contributors (the most notable examples come under `Criticisms' headings, where someone has replied to an argument. Often, there may be points in these replies which could just as easily be critiqued.). As such it makes sense to me for Talk pages to be used for the discussion of an article's content as well as maintenance, so that knowledge may be refined and enhanced.
This may apply primarily to philosophy articles (where thought and discussion are the means of forwarding argument, in contrast to science where research is just as important), but it is definitely useful in at least this scope. I believe that encouraging this behaviour would increase the development of ideas and thought, and the penetration of said ideas onto Wikipedia's article pages, which would be highly beneficial to both Wikipedia and it's users.
217.155.230.238 ( talk) 23:03, 3 January 2011 (UTC)
I feel I should clear up my proposal slightly. I think that there should be:
I am aware that my second point violates NOR, but from what I have read of its history this usage doesn't contradict its reason for existing. Furthermore, in these cases verifiability is also upheld. I am aware that Wikipedia is not a place for discussion, and Wikiversity's reading groups looks to provide the framework for 1, and also places this discussion into an academic environment. Technically this also gives a source, and means that Wikipedia isn't publishing original research (as that research was conducted through discussion at Wikiversity), although I'd like to reach a solution based on sensibility rather than technicality. The discussion about my proposal on Wikiversity can be found at Wikiversity:Wikiversity:Colloquium#Allow/encourage use of Talk pages for non-maintenance discussion?. Point 1 is sorted as far as I am concerned, but I cannot see any reason why Wikipedia would deny allowing sensible, new research from these discussions into Wikipedia articles. I am aware that NOR serves to help prevent crackpot research from coming into Wikipedia, but doesn't discussion in an academic environment such as Wikiversity credit the usefulness and non-crackpotiness of this research. Basically, we can use a policy of sensible, academic discussion at Wikiversity to ensure only sensible, good ideas develop which means that any resulting ideas would be fit for re-insertion into Wikipedia. A nice academic cycle. 217.155.230.238 ( talk) 12:40, 4 January 2011 (UTC)
This just isn't going to happen, both because it fundamentally conflicts with our mission to build an encyclopedia and because it would draw many resources (e.g. admin time) away from improving the encyclopedia. The "peer review" 217.155.230.238 envisions would probably not be sufficiently rigorous to accomplish anything useful, and even if it were it would still be a complete violation of WP:No original research. I don't know whether this would have a place at Wikiversity or not, but here is not the place to discuss it (take it to Wikiversity). Since this keeps coming up, I've added it to WP:PEREN: WP:PEREN#Allow discussion about the topic of the article. Anomie ⚔ 16:50, 4 January 2011 (UTC)
How about renaming the admins as "moderators". Calling a block a ban. And having a system for private messaging. Also, enable some sort of ubb-like forum method for talk pages. I mean, REALLY, why they heck do I have to feel like a computer programmer writing those silly colons? And in the edit view everything is run together. Blech! Don't tell me cause it's always been that way! And having other people edit my talk posts? Whiskey tango foxtrot? TCO ( talk) 23:41, 3 January 2011 (UTC)
Wikipedia:WikiProject Aviation/Aircraft accidents and incidents ( | talk | history | links | watch | logs) has been edited so that it is no longer marked as a guideline. It was previously marked as a guideline. This is an automated notice of the change ( more information). -- VeblenBot ( talk) 02:00, 6 January 2011 (UTC)
I recently noticed that File:Bled lake.jpg ( | talk | history | links | watch | logs) was uploaded in 2003, but overwritten in 2004 with a different image. That second image is now moved to commons, so I've reverted to the 2003 image (we don't like to delete good images). However, the old image never had a license, which I understand this was common in the early days of WP.
What was the practice at the time for tagging and/or delete such images? I don't want to blindly tag it with {{ subst:nld}}. Also, I note there were two different authors (they would both need to agree to the license, unless the latter improved version were removed).
Note: there is currently a version on commons of the 2003 file, but it doesn't give proper attribution to either author. Magog the Ogre ( talk) 23:41, 3 January 2011 (UTC)
Of course; we normally just assume the second work is the same license as the first, because the second uploader writes over top the original image with the license attached right on the page for him/her to see. However, in this case, we can't assume that because this uploader didn't attach a license to his/her derivative work, and there's no way for us to assume the second uploader would agree to the license which the first uploader should shortly give. Magog the Ogre ( talk) 23:57, 3 January 2011 (UTC)
The idea of Wikipedia is excellent. The Internet should have a comprehensive encyclopedia of academic and pop culture topics.
It doesn’t work in the real world, unfortunately.
The most common complaint is that it is open to any one to make a contribution. However, since it is continually peer-reviewed this is not the problem that it may appear to be. Bad information is corrected and may indeed lead to a more informed article/essay after editing and discussion.
No, the real problem is the designation of a score or so “SuperEditors” who have the authority to delete or change an article although they, generally, lack any knowledge base from which to make such decisions.
My expertise, lies in the history and operations of religious denominations and sects, and of comparable political parties and ideologies. I can tell anyone more than they want to know about Hardshell Baptists, or Free Will Baptists or Primitive Universalist Baptists and can equally account for the activities of Gold Democrats, Loco Focos, Hunkers or Mugwumps. Religious or political oddities are a specialty of mine.
With this background, I happened to note that while Wikipedia had articles on the Salvation Army and Volunteers of America, they lacked one on the third such church-based social welfare organization, American Rescue Workers. I, therefore, posted such an entry.
A “SuperEditor” speedily deleted it, he felt that it wasn’t important enough. The SuperEditor obviously didn’t know that the ARW was organized in 1884, that it operated many charitable programs, enlisted the assistance of thousands and served hundreds of thousands annually. Indeed, the “SuperEditor” didn’t bother to read my article. It was deleted, quite frankly, because the “SuperEditor” was woefully ignorant and unwilling to learn.
Interestingly, I also discovered that the Wikipedia “SuperEditors” approved of an article about a political organization that really doesn’t exist. Or rather to be precise, a “organization” which is the creation of one person operating out of his apartment. When informed that this organization probably doesn’t deserve its own entry due to lack of importance, the “SuperEditor” informed me that it must exist because it has a website! Anyone can have a website.
So an organization that serves several hundred thousand people a year out of six major headquarters with a 130 year history isn’t important enough for Wikipedia but one that has only one-member with his own website does.
Silly? Absurd? LAWinans ( talk) 05:28, 4 January 2011 (UTC)
I requested that the deleted article be restored to my user space. I will edit it there, if there is any usable content, then move it into article space. -- Kleopatra ( talk) 16:57, 5 January 2011 (UTC)
The article is now edited and restored to main space. American Rescue Workers. -- Kleopatra ( talk) 17:48, 5 January 2011 (UTC)
Welcome to Wikipedia! Although Einstein's notion that there is no absolute inertial frame of reference is widely accepted, the equivalent in Wikipedia (there is no absolute measure of an article's "notability") is firmly rejected. Folks in Wikipedia insist they can assess the significance of a subject, when there is no absolute measure of that. More important, there IS no need to assess significance. There is no technical limitation to the number of Wikipedia articles, or to the length, or to the list of references. Either the article gets a lot of hits, or it doesn't. Articles with few hits are invisible and should not be agonized over.
This is the approach of Google. Google doesn't assess anything about the worth or notability of a web page. A page rises to the top of a search based on a computer algorithm with no editor and their ego getting in the way.
All utopias come to an end, and Wikipedia is no exception. It has morphed from a lot of people adding to a knowledge database (albeit not perfectly), to a very unfriendly site where nothing new can be added, and emphasis is on perfecting existing articles. An editor actually told me that about all the articles worth writing already appear in Wikipedia. (Like the patent office official that said all inventions have been invented.) Another insisted that cleaning up an article was more work than originally creating the article. (Yeah, like vacuuming a room is more work than building a room.)
So all these folks reading your work, agonizing over its "worth", hitting the delete button until you grovel and jump through a lot of hoops, etc. is just a monumental waste of everyone's time. Wikipedia has gone from how can we retain as much data as possible within some generous rules, to how can we find some reason no matter how capricious to reject new data.
It is fun, easy, and safe to review other's work, stomp on it, criticize it, and say it is never quite perfect enough. You end up with call-out boxes from an amateur editor promulgating yet another made-up requirement, on about every single article.
So get your own web page, publish your stuff on the internet, and call it a day. If you went to all this trouble to create an article based on your subject matter expertise, it is significant. Don't let the amateur volunteers at Wikipedia get in your way. And don't bother fighting Wikipedia bureaucracy, spend your time creating more original works.
Any questions? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Oracle2wiki ( talk • contribs) 15:25, 5 January 2011 (UTC)
And none of this has to do with the definition of encyclopedia. So we come to "summation and summary." Those are hard words to define, except they presumably refer to works SHORTER than the original. But how much shorter? Jimbo Wales said that WP was aiming to place the SUM of all human knowledge in the hands of everyone. He might have meant SUMMARY, but he said SUM, and that has caused very much confusion, since the Sayings of Jimbo are blindly followed in some ways like the Sayings of Chairman Mao.
In any case, none of this helps us with what to summarize and what not, except for the rule that it must be something already published after decent editorial review first, elsewhere (basically). So now, it's your turn. How does any of this help our two disgruntled persons? If it doesn't help, then how-about you contribute something other than a two-sentence brush off? Let's see you think. S B H arris 21:59, 5 January 2011 (UTC)
A comment above is also worthy of thought:
. You have to admit that there's something TO that, at least. WP:NOTPAPER, after all. S B H arris 22:35, 5 January 2011 (UTC)Folks in Wikipedia insist they can assess the significance of a subject, when there is no absolute measure of that. More important, there IS no need to assess significance. There is no technical limitation to the number of Wikipedia articles, or to the length, or to the list of references. Either the article gets a lot of hits, or it doesn't. Articles with few hits are invisible and should not be agonized over.
But it is now a nice example of a community-written stub, and that is due to a bunch of real super editors who do know something about writing and sourcing an article. -- Kleopatra ( talk) 18:22, 6 January 2011 (UTC)
I've done a userpage draft of an essay: User:FormerIP/Crime. Please take a look if you have time and feedback comments on the talkpage or here, good or bad.
I think the essay would be useful because it seems that any crime that is in the news gives rise to deletion discussions as editors create separate articles about victims, suspects etc.
Thanks! -- FormerIP ( talk) 20:05, 5 January 2011 (UTC)
See Special:PrefixIndex/Wikipedia:Naming conventions. Apparently the subject page upon which these branched Wikipedia guidelines sprung out of was moved to Wikipedia:Article titles per this requested move proposal. I'm wondering whether we should move these pages to the new "Article titles" pages instead? :| TelCo NaSp Ve :| 08:22, 6 January 2011 (UTC)
Question One: In the event an edit is challenged on the basis of the letter of a policy or guideline and it is clear that under the letter of the rule the edit is improper:
My feeling is that the common sense answer to this ought to be that since policies and guidelines are the consensus of the community that they ought to prevail over any attempt to edit in contradiction of them:
(If the editor making the edit is a newcomer, I also think that the challenger should also have the obligation to at least provide links to the specific rule in question, to WP:IAR, and to WP:POLICY#Adherence.)
Corollary Question Two: If a challenged edit clearly violates the letter of policy, but the editor making the edit asserts that the edit is proper in accordance with the spirit of the rule under WP:POLICY#Adherence or that a local exception should be made under WP:IAR and, in either case, offers non-trivial reasons to support their position, does the proposed edit:
My two cents is that it should fail, first, because all edits to Wikipedia must be made by consensus if challenged and, second, because the letter of policies and guidelines is the standing consensus of the community until changed.
If this has been determined at some previous time, I'd appreciate (and only need) links to those discussions, especially if they represent consensus on the question. Best regards, TRANSPORTERMAN ( TALK) 22:37, 6 January 2011 (UTC)
I think there should be a rule or statement on wikipedia about people trying to be Judge Judy-like. I've gotten statements like that sinse I was an IP, and I don't want anyone to get that kind of message. I think it's time for those with authority to quit trying to Judge Judy people, because that will just ruin comunication, which woulden't be good. Only the real Judge Judy is Judge Judy, and I don't want me or anyone to feel that they are in a Judge Judy situation when they do something mialdly wrong because an admin or other user decides to be a Judge Judy-esk figure. Time for this to stop, that's why i'm suggesting a rule or write up about that. Even if a rule has a shortcut like WP: Judge Judy, that will do the trick as well. Thanks for your time, N.I.M. (talk) (redacted) 10:52, 6 January 2011 (UTC)
See Judge Judy, the users have left me messages that appear to have the same kind of attitude and personality as Judge Judy, and it seems like they're just trying to be authoritative in the wrong way. This has happened to me in the past, and i'm sure to others. Even if a shortcut to a policy is WP: Don't Be Judge Judy, that's alright too. I'm 100% serious about this, i promis you. I know my grammar and spelling is bad, but i'm still completely serious. N.I.M. (talk) (redacted) 11:26, 6 January 2011 (UTC)
No, that has nothing to do with it, Back when i was an IP editor, I got accusations about me that were absolutely false, and the people would not hear anything contrary to their accusations. Even when i created an account, i was accused of making those vandelism edits in august, cut-off ties thinks i'm the one who made those edits, when it was my former friend (let's call him george,as i don't have permission to give his real name), who actualy made those edits to wikipedia while using my computer to "play a game." My spelling and grammar has nothing to do with it. I don't care what people think of my grammar, that's not what i'm talking about. I'm talkking about disputes i've had in the past, where the accusers give me a Judge Judy-esk mannor of responding. N.I.M. (talk) (redacted) 00:15, 7 January 2011 (UTC)
A discussion is currently taking place about the MOS recommendation that bulleted lists should be rewritten as prose. It specifically concerns making a possible exception for sections on 'Notable residents' in articles about towns and cities. Your comments are welcome at: Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (embedded lists). Thanks. -- Kudpung ( talk) 02:33, 8 January 2011 (UTC)
I have a sweet photo that I was using in Painted turtle. I thought I was all clean having gotten the proper release, yada yada. However, an issue has come up regarding the artwork of the sign itself, the black drawing of a turtle. I have now been through a bunch of discussions of Freedom of Panoroma, de minimus, fair use; have read Canadian copyright law and parsed US and Canadian traffic manuals, etc. I would like to get some community input to see if the image can be "saved". At this point, I cut it out of the article, and even put in an AFD at Commons (killing my own child!) And of course, now someone doesn't want to delete it at Commons. Haha...can't win.
Seriously, though, I am just reaching out. Sometimes more minds help solve a problem. I don't want opinions like "looks fine to me" OR "someone raised an issue, therefore it must be wrong". If possible I want to save the image. But if not, then still useful for me as an editor to understand, better, the boundaries and reasons for them. Also, not looking for any agitation or canvassing or dramah. Just want people who have head-scratched on this stuff before to advise.
FYI: I went to a fair amount of effort (calling a naturalist) to get the image and the release, not that that matters, but, OK. As far as the usage, I think it is a very "adroit" image for my story. It's a well constructed photo. It's the right species, the right location, the right selection (didn't want something hokey like a turtle on the road). Also, it's a photo that I could see using in an article on turtle road mortality (and strategies to prevent it). that said, it is not as crucial as a cover photo of a book for a book article or the like. It's just a thoughtful additive image. Not decorative fluff OR do or die, vital.
See here for previous discussions:
TCO ( talk) 22:06, 3 January 2011 (UTC)
I think you are really getting wrapped around the axle here on copyright. The sign is deliberately placed so that people will notice it. Whatever is publicly displayed outdoors may be photographed without asking permission. Period. (That is why we have spy satellites.) Now whoever took the photo owns copyright to the photo, and can provide permissions etc. when others request to use it. The design of the turtle is likely under copyright, and if so you could not use it for other purposes without permission. If the Canadians have an issue with this, they can take it up with the US Ambassador. I recall that IBM's original BIOS software for their pc was under copyright, that Canada completely ignored. Their clone makers just copied the software. So don't feel you need to cater to Canadian sensibilities in the copyright arena.
The easiest thing for you to do is get a camera, go to the site, and capture your own image under your own copyright. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Oracle2wiki ( talk • contribs) 14:29, 5 January 2011 (UTC)
Editors who work with copyright issues, and lawyers, may be interested in the discussion at Commons:Commons:Village pump#Copyrightability of security camera recordings. Sandstein 20:27, 9 January 2011 (UTC)
User TCO started a conversation about standardizing the format of citations used on Wikipedia. Also to include a requirement to use inline citations. All interested parties are encouraged to join the conversation is at Wikipedia talk:Citing sources/example style#why not standardize on one format? - Hydroxonium ( talk) 23:22, 9 January 2011 (UTC)
Hello, I'm not 100% sure this is the right place for this, but any help would be appreciated. Recently I was reading an article, and on the left in the languages list I saw that one language (which I had never heard of) had a star beside it. I didn't know what this meant but when I hovered over the star it said that it means that it's a featured article in that language. I was curious about what constitutes a featured article in this obscure language so I clicked it. Thinking nothing of it, I left. Fast forward to today and I get an email from wikipedia in this same unintelligible (to me) language, and from what I can discern it is updating me on some kind of change to my user or talk page. Apparently merely clicking the language link set a bunch of things in motion that I was not notified about.
I would like to know: A.) How did the individual who posted on my foreign-language talk page become aware that I had clicked the link?
B.) What other information about my browsing habits are recorded, and who is notified about them and why?
C.) How can I erase that language from my global logins and erase the foreign-language talk page? I want to retain my English-language user/talk pages, but I don't want to have anything to do with that other language whatsoever.
I don't think it's a good policy to infer a bunch of things about a person's intentions when they click a language link, and it certainly bothers me that an individual was notified about this and that I received an email in reference to it.
The new page is Here.
Thanks, LuftWaffle0 ( talk) 21:30, 6 January 2011 (UTC)
Is there a backup policy in Wikipedia? I wonder, as in: Wikipedia_talk:Bot_Approvals_Group#Mediation_Committee_bot:_any_writers.3F and User_talk:AGK#Mediationbot1_fix. Policy is needed. Thanks. History2007 ( talk) 21:44, 10 January 2011 (UTC)
Whats the policy on featured article? How is a particular article selected as featured article? I am raising this question as today's featured article "Homer's Enemy" seems too specific and would be of little appeal to the general public. Having the "The Simpsons" as a featured article would have made more sense. Featuring a specific episode/season of a particular TV series spoils the professionalism of Wikipedia as an encyclopedia.
— Preceding
unsigned comment added by
Sampalex (
talk •
contribs) 04:21, 6 January 2011 (UTC)
I think there is a happy medium of specificity (and agree with you). Doing an FA on "Chemistry" is insanely difficult and probably less interesting than an article on Polonium. That said, giving the front page, (unless we are out of candidates) to an article on "bromo-chlorinated polonium compounds" would be wasting the front page of the newspaper. Obviously we are a volunteer project and people may work on what they want, as obscure as can be. That said, even though it is a value judgment, it's reasonable to think of what the reader wants and every media in the world does so. One can use google ranking or a vote (perhaps helpful for more history stuff or to overcome some popculture bias) or a panel or what have you. If the front page more often had interesting stuff rather than obscure or boring (same issue with DYK), I would read it more often. And many others would read it more too. And then this "draw" to get on the front page can be used as a tiny reward to motivate the unpaid volunteers slugging out the content. TCO ( talk) 04:34, 6 January 2011 (UTC)
It's really easy. The subject matter of the FA is of no regard in deciding whether the article makes it to FA or not. FAs are articles which are of the highest quality, irrespective of their subject matter. You are entitled to your view, of course, but for me it is a nonsense to suggest that we "spoil the professionalism of wikipedia" by selecting as FAs articles which deal with a subset of a wider subject area. As it happens, The Simpsons is also an FA and appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page as Today's featured article on December 17, 2007. So it rather looks to me as if you're merely late to the party, and woefully ill-informed. -- Tagishsimon (talk) 11:22, 6 January 2011 (UTC)
This whole discussion is predicated on a false premise, namely that today's featured article "Homer's Enemy" seems too specific and would be of little appeal to the general public. Here are the hit counts for Homer's Enemy, and the three FAs before and after it:
Conclusion - Homer's Enemy was a highly popular choice and our readers found it more interesting than the other choices of that week. Raul654 ( talk) 18:22, 12 January 2011 (UTC)
Is this correct that a single person picks today's featured article? Why? -- Kleopatra ( talk) 14:59, 12 January 2011 (UTC)
This discussion needs to be added to WP:PEREN so we don't have to keep educating each time a new editor who doesn't understand or follow WP:TFA/R comes along. Until/unless someone finds an actual problem with Raul's exemplary handling of the mainpage or the functioning of WP:TFA/R, there's little to discuss, and we just end up re-educating over and over. Kleopatra seems to be confusing the WP:FAC process with WP:TFA/R; what is the plagiarized article you refer to, Kleopatra, and where has your input at FAC been discounted? I just reviewed all of your contributions to Wikipedia:Featured article candidates subpages, and can find no such occurrence. Neither of those issues have anything to do with Raul's choosing of Today's Featured Article. SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 16:13, 12 January 2011 (UTC)
Wikipedia is primarily a project to build a free and open encyclopedia. It is also an experiment in some form of online democracy, but there is no reason to be fundamentalist about that. Hans Adler 16:43, 12 January 2011 (UTC)
PS I am going back to editing. Please feel free to accuse me of additional bad intentions on my user page. Thanks. -- Kleopatra ( talk) 16:22, 13 January 2011 (UTC)
I don't know where I was told this to begin with, but I asked again here and one person agreed that the article should be about the radio station, not its frequency. WSYN, WOMG, WLXC, WAZO and WSFM (FM) are examples of where I fixed articles where the call letters and format were moved to a new place. In the case of WLXC and WOMG, as well as WAZO and WSFM, they were swapped. When WSYN moved to its old frequency, WYAK essentially went off the air, but since a new station ( WLFF, on the former WSYN frequency) had basically the same format, I considered WLFF to be a continuation of WYAK since the formats were swapped. I did this because at least one person started putting older information about WSYN in the WSYN article, even though that station's early history was with WLFF.
There is a frequency move that has taken place. What was WUIN is now WMYT (FM) if you go by frequency and WSFM (FM) if you go by format and name. The discussion is on Talk:WSFM (FM) and what to be seems the sensible approach is being opposed. I'd like some clear guidelines. So far WSFM has not changed call letters, which doesn't help my case. Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 17:26, 11 January 2011 (UTC)
I'd like to add WORD (AM) to the list of stations which simply changed frequencies. WOLI (AM) was WSPA before it moved, but the change to the current letters came long after the swap. Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 19:01, 11 January 2011 (UTC)
In some cases I wonder whether this might be akin to a professional sport team moving to a new city and changing its name? The underlying corporate entity might remain the same, but the public face is so drastically different that it still has a new identity. That seems like an easier case to me than radio stations moving around within the same city, though I still remember a rather contentious merge discussion years past involving whether the Expos and the Nationals should have separate articles. But in any event, the point is that mere continuity of legal formalities might not provide the best or final answer as to how article content is best organized. Good luck sorting it out. ; ) postdlf ( talk) 14:58, 13 January 2011 (UTC)
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Does BLP cover animals? Simply south ( talk) 23:12, 3 December 2010 (UTC)
Thanks for the replies. In that case how about a new guideline is created on the biographies or notabilities of individual animals? This is not a joke. Simply south ( talk) 16:38, 5 December 2010 (UTC)
It occurs to me that we may need something equivalent to WP:BLP in strength for articles on existing entities such as companies, corporations, and such. This edit is the one that got my attention. Imagine seeing something like that in a BLP; here we have an uncited assertion that the company murdered someone to shut them up. Aside from the obvious ethical issue of needing to get this stuff right, using verifiable, reliable sources -- entities such as this have considerable legal resources and such edits put us arguably at greater risk than a similar edit to the biography of an individual. In the example, the anon editor is essentially accusing the company of complicity in a murder. Do we need a "WP:BEC" ("existing companies") policy, or is Wikipedia:Libel sufficient? Note that BLP specifically states that it doesn't apply to companies and groups. Has this been discussed before? Antandrus (talk) 20:46, 5 December 2010 (UTC)
A new page, WP:Further reading, is under construction. Its purpose is to expand on the WP:FURTHER section of MOS:LAYOUT.
The MOS guideline currently says that ==Further reading== is "A bulleted list, usually alphabetized, of a reasonable number of editor-recommended publications that do not appear elsewhere in the article and were not used to verify article content."
Rjensen ( talk · contribs) would like to ditch the long-standing (2006?) rule about not normally listing sources in both the ==References== and ==Further reading== section of the same article. If you have an opinion or want to comment about how the community uses/should use this section, please join the current discussion. Thanks, WhatamIdoing ( talk) 20:52, 6 December 2010 (UTC)
Do the votes of unregistered users carry equal weight with those of registered users e.g. when discussing deletions or moves? -- Bermicourt ( talk) 17:53, 6 December 2010 (UTC)
The person who wrote the article about ^ group seems to be a heavy metal fan... go check out the article to see why :D
-K — Preceding unsigned comment added by Miss Jupiter ( talk • contribs) 16:23, 8 December 2010 (UTC)
As I have been working more in talk pages I have noticed a few things that I think need to be clarified and corrected regarding the assessment of certain classes of non-article items such as Categories, Templates, Disambiguation pages and Redirects.
1) Non-article items not tagged with an appropriate talk page banner:
2) Non-article items tagged with an incorrect assessment:
3) Non-article items tagged with an incorrect importance or priority:
Correctly identifying these things will allow visibility of them which is currently difficult at best. In the case of Redirects, there are a lot of redirects that exist because of accidental spelling errors or were created as a possible scenario link that is unlikely and tagging them will increase visibility of them so they can potentially be eliminated. -- Kumioko ( talk) 01:33, 6 December 2010 (UTC)
Kumioko, you say "I believe they should be tagged somehow and accounted for."
Why? What practical goal are you trying to achieve by spamming a WikiProject banner to the talk page of a {{ R from alternate spelling}} redirect? (Do you know why we have WikiProjects assess pages?) WhatamIdoing ( talk) 05:31, 6 December 2010 (UTC)
Generally, it's left to the WikiProjects themselves to determine what pages they want to incorporate into their scope. As to the incorrect assessments, one possibility would be to have the banner template automatically assess based on namespace where indicated. Would that address the concern? -- Bsherr ( talk) 06:00, 6 December 2010 (UTC)
Kumioko primarily seems worried that s/he'll get something deleted, and then some person who didn't know about the deletion discussion will come back and ask to have it restored at a later date, on the grounds that consensus can change, and thus Kumioko will have "lost" or wasted time. I think this is a really trivial problem: It happens every day for prod'd articles, and the world hasn't stopped spinning yet. Worrying about the occasional (what, one or two percent?) un-deletion request is really a waste of time and energy. WhatamIdoing ( talk) 23:10, 7 December 2010 (UTC)
Well that is one concern, but not the only one. Here is a better list of some concerns I have with these things not being tagged by something:
In general I just don't think we should have things scattered around in the shadows of WP completely unseen. If these things are needed and important enough to exist then they should be visible to the project. In the end if the project doesn't want to see them that's fine but as it is the majority of the active projects account for a lot of these things in one form or another. -- Kumioko ( talk) 02:11, 8 December 2010 (UTC)
Kumioko,
You're not talking sense. It's like you've already decided that you want to do this, so you're making up nonsensical reasons to support your decision. Here's your list of alleged benefits, with my comments.
If you want to find double redirects or badly formatted dab pages or empty categories, then just go find them! You don't need to spam wikiproject banners to do these things.
If you want me to support this kind of spam, then you need to identify a worthy goal that cannot be done without creating hundreds or thousands of new talk pages. WhatamIdoing ( talk) 21:52, 9 December 2010 (UTC)
Just wondered if I could get some more people to weigh in on this discussion. Thanks. -- Dorsal Axe 11:44, 9 December 2010 (UTC)
Hi, I have a problem with the article White Argentine. In the article I mentioned many people who are Argentine by birth and by option (they immigrated when they were children and stayed in Argetnina until their death, or they are now living there). All those people mentioned in the article are perfectly Caucasian by phenotype, and all have European/Middle Eastern ancestry. To see the names, check this older version of the article, for they are now removed. This is because some users appeared criticizing the article and alleging that mentioning all those persons without a source that explicitly define them as "White Argentine/Argentinian" was a breach to Wikipedia's BLP policy. Is that true? Because I read the article of WP policy on categorization by ethnicity, gender, religion and sexuality, and the topic "Race" is still under dispute. Besides, one of the users that criticizes the article is also involved in the proposal/discussion/RfC of the policy itself. If the matter isn't still resolved, can they apply a rule that it is not fully valid yet? If I provide sources that every living Argentine mentioned in the article is of predominantly European ancestry, isn't that enough to define him/her as White? Please, help me clarify this doubt.-- Pablozeta ( talk) 12:29, 9 December 2010 (UTC)
Is there a guideline or even rule of thumb that states a category should have a minimum no. of articles in order to avoid being deleted for being too small? My searches so far haven't found anything. -- Bermicourt ( talk) 21:58, 10 December 2010 (UTC)
Thanks folks, that's useful. I guess also if there are fewer than say five to eight articles in a category, a key question is whether the category is likely to grow in future. I also understand that numbers are not the only criterion in deciding whether a category should exist or not. -- Bermicourt ( talk) 19:57, 11 December 2010 (UTC)
There are currently 500+ images that I've listed at User:Smallman12q/DOE media which may be non-free, but tagged with a free license. Is it possible that the WMF could send a mass OTRS ticket to the the national laboratories to get permission for the images? Smallman12q ( talk) 22:11, 10 December 2010 (UTC)
Phan Thị Kim Phúc and many of the type and Wikileaks documents prove - US/European crimes are documented (sometimes produced) and disseminated, the totalitarian ones aren't. If you are against censorship, go to N-Korea and bring some photos. Xx236 ( talk) 11:20, 8 December 2010 (UTC)
Offer a General Discussion tab for all topics! Where else would be a better place to have meta-discussions? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.171.44.251 ( talk) 14:03, 10 December 2010 (UTC)
As yet another debate about the CoS kicks off at AN/I, can I propose that Wikipedia declares as a matter of policy that such topics are unequivocally boring. Personally, I find religion in general an interesting topic, as I do many social constructs, but frankly, the sort of debate that centres around Scientology seems so utterly vacuous, and doomed to sink into tit-for-tat Wikilawyering and half-baked sock-puppetry, that it isn't worth the attention. Can I therefore propose that a new template be created to warn the unwary that they are about to be suckered into reading tabloid theology and prepubescent conspiracy theories (from all participants - the CoS at least attempts to pretend to be serious), and that such debates are only of interest to the terminally obsessive? This might allow the uninvolved reader to read something of more use, like disputes over the translation of Manga characters' names into Swahili, or whether the North Pole moves around while you run in circles around it... AndyTheGrump ( talk) 05:47, 12 December 2010 (UTC)
|}
Can someone please point me to the definition of consensus, as it is used here at Wikipedia? Anthony ( talk) 16:44, 12 December 2010 (UTC)
Notice: I've posted a discussion on the wp:MERGE page's discussion page asking about how to determine when to create separate articles about both a criminal and the crime for which s/he is noted and when to combine them.-- Hodgson-Burnett's Secret Garden ( talk) 18:05, 12 December 2010 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Deceased Wikipedians/Guidelines ( | talk | history | links | watch | logs) has recently been edited to mark it as a guideline. This is an automated notice of the change ( more information). -- VeblenBot ( talk) 02:00, 14 December 2010 (UTC)
Wikipedia:WikiProject Aviation/Accident article notability ( | talk | history | links | watch | logs) has recently been edited to mark it as a guideline. This is an automated notice of the change ( more information). -- VeblenBot ( talk) 02:00, 10 December 2010 (UTC)
I seems like instruction creep to me. Also it's clearly a content guideline and not a notability guideline. Taemyr ( talk) 17:14, 11 December 2010 (UTC)
More broadly speaking, there are 22 pages in the category Category:WikiProject Aviation guidelines, and I've been wondering whether or not these pages are claiming to be "guidelines" in the official sense of the word? It appears that most of them were written by a single editor ( Trevor MacInnis), and they are often cited as representing consensus (I have recently questioned this point here). Is it okay for them to be using the word "guideline" in this case? Thanks, Mlm42 ( talk) 21:20, 13 December 2010 (UTC)
On Talk:Pain, Anthonyhcole ( talk · contribs) defends the non-use of citation templates with the observation that apparently adding these can increase page load time by 50%. [1] I know the use of citation templates is not mandatory, but I have never seen this as an argument not to use a particular feature. I was wondering if there was a policy about this somewhere, and what others thought about this line of reasoning. JFW | T@lk 08:50, 12 December 2010 (UTC)
ref=harv
mechanism. The first=
/last=
system is necessary for that. And of course {{
harv}}, {{
sfn}}, et al. are beneficial for articles where multiple pages of the same single source are used. Not least because they reduce the number of times that one has to employ the same citation template over and over! There's a huge helping of irony, here, more on which below.
Uncle G (
talk) 00:09, 14 December 2010 (UTC)I looked through the history of the article, and it appears that the article Pain has an established style that uses cite templates. In any case, the established style should be preserved and whoever tried to change it should be handed a trout for starting the same conversation again. The general rule, as SlimVirgin says, is that the established style should be kept. There is no consensus wiki-wide about whether template citations, or non-template citations, are superior. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 22:25, 12 December 2010 (UTC)
This conversation is happening at two locations, here and Talk:Pain#Cite_ref. I am the editor arguing for handwritten citations on the article Pain and - for ease of following and to avoid duplication - I'm restricting my comments to that venue. Anthony ( talk) 04:35, 13 December 2010 (UTC)
The irony of the discussion here, especially what Jfdwolff writes above about not using first=
/last=
, is that looking at
Pain#References I see at least one source cited multiple times just to employ different page numbers and several other sources cited with ranges of pages encompassing the entire source work, where the exact page number(s) supporting the content are not given. The irony is that instead actually using first=
/last=
, in conjunction with either {{
sfn}} or {{
harvnb}} (neither of which employ meta-templates and lots of parameters, note), would for starters reduce the number of citations of one of the sources from six instances of {{
cite book}} to just one, and allow the provision of the specific page numbers for several others.
Uncle G (
talk) 00:09, 14 December 2010 (UTC)
Also, you can worry about performance if you can tell the difference yourself. If you find that a page takes ten seconds to load, and takes only one second to load if you remove a particular template, and you can reliably reproduce this and other editors confirm they can too, then obviously the template is slowing down that page. If you would like the page to load faster, then by all means remove or simplify the template. (Bold in original.)
Background of problem - A recent bot run by User:VWBot to revert hundreds of edits made to articles has, I believe, overstepped the bounds of how we should treat articles that have been edited by copyright violators. In this case, several hundred articles were reverted to a state prior to being edited by Accotink2, a known Sockpuppeteer and who was known to violate copyright on several occassions. The problem with this case, and I suspect others as well, is that this editor also made a lot of good improvements to articles such as adding references or citations. The bot however, based on current policy, assumed that every edit the user ever made was a copyright violation and reverted a lot of articles that didn't need to be reverted. This had/caused several problems:
Its this last point that I want to draw attention too because I think this is the root of the problems we are facing with this bot run and with the overtasked nature of the project in general. I don't think that its necessary to directly assume that all edits are copyvios and I think we can make some logic to filter out some of them out getting to the ones that truly are the problem.
Recommendation - I think if we tweak the wording slightly it will reduce some of the workload of the project, it will reduce the unneeded reversions and will still meet the end result of making sure the Copy violation information has been eliminated. I think there are occasions were we can reasonably assume (although admittedly not 100%) that the violators actions were not harmful or that they have been overcome by events. Here are some things I think we should incorporate into the wording:
All three of the above suggestions could be "filtered and monitored" by a bot but I don't think that the bot should necessarily make changes to the article. I don't know exactly how this should be worded or incorporated but I think this would both cut down on the amount of articles that need to be reviewed and clarify the unnecessarily absolute and heavy handed wording of the currently policy. -- Kumioko ( talk) 15:04, 11 December 2010 (UTC)
Actually I might have a proposed change for the policy. Currently it says major contributions. I would suggest changing this to creative contributions. Major appears to refer to the size of a contribution, but as you are well aware copyvio's have been found in edits of slightly more than 100 bytes. Also edits such as creating tables, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(policy)infoboxes and reference addition can be massive in size, but are not creative work and can't be copyvios. Yoenit ( talk) 21:10, 11 December 2010 (UTC)
I was under the impression that WP:ROOT was rejected. However, WP:OUTLINE looks to be exactly the same thing and there is a veritable forest of "Outline of" articles in this encyclopedia. [2] Was there discussion about this that allows outline pages but not root pages? ( this confusing discussion is the closest I could find.) If not, should some or all of these outline pages be deleted? A great deal of them look like synthetic amalgams better suited to something like DMOZ.
jps ( talk) 04:28, 13 December 2010 (UTC)
Surely it is not right that the standard FPC template refers to a "voting period" ? ╟─ Treasury Tag► constablewick─╢ 08:51, 24 November 2010 (UTC)
I know this has been brought up before. Probably repeatedly. I don't care. It's becoming increasingly insulting that, despite having closed the banner multiple times, Jimmy Wales continues to bug me for money:
“ | I'm a volunteer.
I don't get paid a cent for my work at Wikipedia, and neither do our thousands of other volunteer authors and editors. |
” |
Likewise, James Jimmy. I've given countless hours of my time researching, writing, and maintaining thousands and thousands of articles and images for Wikipedia over the last six years, not to mention the time I've put in protecting the articles from vandalism, or maintaining the processes of the site.
Yet, for some reason, he keeps reappearing to bug me for money. I don't recall ever having been paid a cent for my work here, work that has undoubtedly improved the site's standing with people who WOULD pay a cent. I, and many other thousands like me, are exactly the reasons WHY people will donate to Wikipedia. Because of our hard work, Wikipedia exists and needs money to continue existing. Just don't insult me by taking my labor for free, willingly offered and delivered, and then having the gall to ask me to donate further, after I politely said "no" by clicking the X. I'm getting tired of it.
There's two possibilities here, both annoying but only one malicious: either the programmers are so inept as to be unable to code the site to remember who has closed the banner, or someone is consciously restoring the banner ad to those who have closed it. I rather like the coders, so I hope that is not the situation, which leaves open the malicious option of someone choosing to annoy the kind volunteers of this site whom have already expressed no desire to donate at this time. This seems much more likely than inept programmers.
So here's a policy request: When someone closes a banner, don't roll your eyes and throw that out. Respect your users well enough to stop displaying it when they have closed it.
I will not be donating money to Wikipedia; stop asking. Haven't I donated enough already? -- Golbez ( talk) 20:05, 16 December 2010 (UTC)
An "admin", posted on a front page discussion that I was violating personal attack rules. This is right. But what was also right, he was exercising double standards. This is because I was defending myself against someone that explicitly, clearly and unequivocally said that I blame ALL wikipedians to be Fascists (while that was ridiculous since I'm also a wikipedians since I post here. I clearly meant specific ones). He never said that to him. He let him attacking me. That was also done by someone else below him. Someone else tried to find "evidence" that I blame ALL wikipedians to be fascist. He never said anything to him either. I suppose, to be allowed here to do personal attacks, act like a gang and destroy discussion with bullying, you have to be "polite" about it. Just like how the British Empire would slaughter people in African Colonies. "But we are polite at least!". Hypocrites. -- Leladax ( talk) 07:22, 18 December 2010 (UTC)
This was discussed briefly above, but I'd like to start a new section because my concern is more broad than the specific guideline which was being discussed. Many WikiProjects have their own guidelines and style guides, created to ensure consistency across a large class of articles. I think this is a good idea. But there is a problem: A WikiProject guideline could be written by a single editor with no prior discussion, and possibly without consensus. Existing tags, such as {{ essay}}, or {{ Draft proposal}} seem inappropriate (and, indeed, are rarely on such guidelines).. and with no tags, editors may come across a WikiProject guideline page and think there is wide consensus on its contents (as is the case for real guidelines).. not realizing it was written by some guy four years ago with no prior discussion!
So I'd like to propose the use of a yet-to-be-created tag (maybe called {{ WikiProject Guideline}}) which lets readers know the guideline may only be supported in it's entirety by a small number of editors, and possibly encourages further discussions. Of course, some specific issues in WikiProject guidelines have, no doubt, been discussed at length; so I think it would be nice if WikiProject guidelines were to include in-line citations of these discussions, to emphasize which points in fact do have broad consensus.. maybe in-line references to discussions could also be encouraged in such a tag. Does that sound like a good idea? Mlm42 ( talk) 00:52, 16 December 2010 (UTC)
I think we should make an "deleted page archive" type of thing, that archives deleted articles, excep those who are appearant vandalism and libel. Some people will have a trivial interest in looking at old articles, and it could be user for reference matters at a later time. MikeNicho231 ( talk) 15:35, 17 December 2010 (UTC)
Based on what I've encountered in WP:ANI and other noticeboards, I'd like to suggest the following policy under the name WP:NOBOOMERANG:
I would appreciate any comments, particularly constructive ones. Dylan Flaherty 19:57, 14 December 2010 (UTC)
Let me try to accommodate your points:
Version 2:
For your convenience, here's the diff. Please let me know if this resolves your concerns. Dylan Flaherty 21:56, 14 December 2010 (UTC)
I make no attempt to defend the marketing. :-) The current dispute resolution process also depends on people agreeing. For example, agreeing that someone violated a rule. My core suggestion is that we make it standard to at least ask whether a new topic is relevant. Right now, this seemingly obvious question doesn't come up, and attempts to bring it up are taken as hostile. That's the deep problem here. Dylan Flaherty 19:49, 15 December 2010 (UTC)
My proposed wording for NOBOOMERANG. Do not act in a manner that will give other users opportunity to use an unrelated retaliatory argument against you if you have reason to bring a situation to WP:ANI or other noticeboards. Seriously... -- Onorem ♠ Dil 00:13, 16 December 2010 (UTC)
Not to put too fine a point on it, but this is more of a modification of existing rules than an addition. Dylan Flaherty 18:31, 16 December 2010 (UTC)
I love Wikipedia. Or, more accurately, I love the IDEA of Wikipedia. I used to devote/volunteer upwards 30 to 40 hours a week to creating new and editing entries. That's as much as a paying job. And when I wasn't doing that, I was usually surfing the articles. I would sometimes find myself on a page and have to keep hitting the back button just to follow the "cyber trail" back to where it started, often laughing at just how esoteric the path was.
But I also kept getting frustrated and pissed off over inane, pointless edit conflicts where some bozo calling himself "Lord Zoltran" would come in after hours of work on a subject and with a single keystroke wipe it out while arrogantly claiming the rationale that it wasn't encyclopedic enough. I watched as many other smart, informed and dedicated editors would finally just give up and decide they had better things to do with their valuable time than deal with these types. Worst, they didn't seem to be any sort of real help from the staff to settle these things.
Much I felt stemmed from the the "good on paper, terrible in practice" idea that people could be anonymous. Fine if said editor was in Nepal, but not those of us in most Western Democracies. Does someone really need to protect their identity to edit the article on Banana Slugs??? Yet, there's Darth Sidious 2, TwistofCain and Diannaa in the history. It's even more questionable when it comes to those given the status of senior editors (been so long, can't remember the Wiki lingo for them) or Sysops.
And the type of people who were being driven out by this nonsense were exactly the type of person who gives money to Wikipedia. For last several years, I couldn't afford to donate to any of my favorite organizations. Now, I'm finally in fiscal position that makes it possible again, yet I hesitate greatly when it comes to heeding the appeal banners.
Something to consider when you look at that donation bar that is only half-way to the goal... RoyBatty42 ( talk) 03:33, 17 December 2010 (UTC)
It is certainly true that only 10% or less of admins have "human" names - and who can say which of those are real? I am aware a number of people regret not using their "real name" and I think it might be more healthy. There is evidence (proper scientific research) that people behave worse when afforded cyber-anonymity, particularly in respect to cyber-bullying. Nonetheless, there are valuable aspects to anonymity too, I have seen may threats on Wikipedia, and more, and more violent ones on other fora, while I have not been on the receiving end of any, I can understand peoples reluctance to use their own name.
Rich
Farmbrough, 08:18, 20 December 2010 (UTC).
I think wikipedia is one of the greatest contributions to mankind.and at the same time i feel that such a noble thing should not fall short of money in anyway.to ensure this i urge upon to you to have sustainable commercial exposure in the webpage which will create a fund required for the existance,maintenance,research and developement of this great effort.of course donation will also continue.the commercials may be selective that will not deter the main effort.seeing the angel like face of mr. jimmy wales,i feel that we cannot let wikipedia to wash off only for monetary crisis which is very much visible in this sort of noble works.long live jimmy wales,long live wikipedia. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 123.49.58.58 ( talk) 18:52, 20 December 2010 (UTC)
An issue has been brewing over what constitutes a bot or bot type edit and we need to get this situation resolved so I am bringing it here for discussion.
Background: Rich Farmbrough has been consistently blocked and badgered over his high speed edits using AWB and was recently blocked for 48 hours by RD232 because he determined that Rich's creation of 300 articles using AWB constituted a breach of bot policy as a "bot-type" edit.
Clarification needed: There are a couple of items that need to be clarified here relating to Wikipedia:Bot_policy#Mass_article_creation
[My block is irrelevant to this btw. I raised the issue at BOTPOL before that happened, and was not blocked under this provision.]
OK, the thing is
WP:MEATBOT is exactly what is being challenged here. That and confusion over the various "bot-like" aspects of behaviour. My contention is that MEATBOT is creating problems for the future, while simply saying "apply the DUCK test to edits" seems an easy fix, in fact it moves the contention to whether DUCK is passed. If this is by fiat of BAG then BAG may define anyone to be a bot and hence subject to BAGPOL. While I don't suggest that this will be abused, it is bad policy. If it is by consensus discussion, then not only have we not resolved the problem that MEATBOT is intended to solve but if we err in one direction we alienate editors, if we err in the other cases are thrown back to the human editing rules, which therefore need to be able to deal with them (and usually, and historically can). Essentially the reason to stop something happening is because it's a bad idea, not because it's being done in a way that is reminiscent of a bot. And that does not mean speed - I (for example) have been chastised on that very basis "It's not the speed it's the bot-like nature of the edits." BOTPOL/BAG/BRFAs have done a great job in getting productive bots accepted by the community (despite shortfalls and various widely publicised incidents), there is, however, no reason to think that extending their purview to human editing ha any merit.
Rich
Farmbrough, 15:04, 19 December 2010 (UTC).
I agree with Jim Miller and Yoenit that the WikiProject talk page banners provide valuable information about the state of the article. Not just to the project but to others who may be interested in working on that article or topic. Having a blue linked talk page, even if only a banner for a project, is better than a red link. Red links are bad. They look uninviting and make the article appear as though its been abandoned in the wastelands of WP. There are a couple reasons why a blue linked talk page are better than a redlinked one. We definately don't need to be bot deleting them.
I just wonder, does being the child of a famous person(s) make you notable for Wikipedia? I think it should'nt be that way, as having a famous parent(s) does not automatically make that person famous. MikeNicho231 ( talk) 21:11, 19 December 2010 (UTC)
Is it normal to add copyright by-lines to images as done in the photograph in Posy Simmonds? I thought we didn't do that on Wikipedia but don't have a guideline to hand saying that. WP:WATERMARK seems to almost, but not quite, say it. SpinningSpark 15:01, 21 December 2010 (UTC)
Not sure who is responding to what but overall:
The key question was this "Is it normal to add copyright by-lines to images as done in the photograph..." And the answer, for anyone in the real world, is "Yes. It is not only normal but expected. To those in the industry the answer is "In most cases it is explicit in the rights usage and is most likely spelled out in the contract/license/agreement." In Wikiworld it is just a "personal and idiosyncratic interpretation" where the real world is "irrelevant." Take your pick. Soundvisions1 ( talk) 22:47, 21 December 2010 (UTC)
If You Distribute, or Publicly Perform the Work or any Adaptations or Collections, You must [...] keep intact all copyright notices for the Work and provide, reasonable to the medium or means You are utilizing: (i) the name of the Original Author [...]; and, (iv) consistent with Section 3(b), in the case of an Adaptation, a credit identifying the use of the Work in the Adaptation [...].
The credit required by this Section 4(d) may be implemented in any reasonable manner; provided, however, that in the case of a Adaptation or Collection, at a minimum such credit will appear, if a credit for all contributing authors of the Adaptation or Collection appears, then as part of these credits and in a manner at least as prominent as the credits for the other contributing authors.
If You Distribute, or Publicly Perform the Work or any Adaptations or Collections, You must [...] keep intact all copyright notices for the Work and provide, reasonable to the medium or means You are utilizing: (i) the name of the Original Author [...]; and, (iv) consistent with Section 3(b), in the case of an Adaptation, a credit identifying the use of the Work in the Adaptation [...].
The credit required by this Section 4(d) may be implemented in any reasonable manner; provided, however, that in the case of a Adaptation or Collection, at a minimum such credit will appear, if a credit for all contributing authors of the Adaptation or Collection appears, then as part of these credits and in a manner at least as prominent as the credits for the other contributing authors.
Wikipedia:Notability (geography) ( | talk | history | links | watch | logs) has recently been edited to mark it as a guideline. This is an automated notice of the change ( more information). -- VeblenBot ( talk) 02:00, 22 December 2010 (UTC)
in over two and half years... |
the glib and the glaring
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1 •
2 |
<opinion>
The nutshell is that we're an encyclopedia and we're not paper. Topics such as a real place, a real river are inherently things we should be covering. The id:articles that were n-tagged need work; they're mostly little stubs. That's how articles start.</opinion>
Boring admin collapses rather silly discussion
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Fences& Windows 02:36, 21 December 2010 (UTC)
I've seen plenty of edit summaries with dirty words, but until today I never saw one get oversighted. I just happened to click on a link for a diff when the offensive edit summary still existed. By the time the diff came up, the edit summary had a line through it, which I recognized as oversight, which I saw for the first time after requesting the removal of someone's personal information.
In looking at the contributions of some vandals, I saw this again and again. One blocked vandal had a contributions list consisting entirely of oversighted edit summaries. Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 22:17, 22 December 2010 (UTC)
So back to my original question--what does it take before an edit summary itself is deleted? Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 16:46, 25 December 2010 (UTC)
It's reasonable to assume that an IP which hasn't had a talk page warning in two years is not even the same person. The previous warning said the IP would be blocked for the next vandalism, but that didn't happen for two years.
I've seen guidelines on this somewhere, but I don't remember where. Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 16:59, 25 December 2010 (UTC)
Should Wikipedia:Namespace be promoted to a guideline? Join the discussion at Wikipedia talk:Namespace#Promote to guideline. Regards -- Bsherr ( talk) 20:24, 25 December 2010 (UTC)
I have long been mystified by the doctrine that 'original research' is deemed to be fault in a Wikipedia article. In the wider world of learning, excavating truths from primary sources - in which, perhaps, only an uncommon mind and an equally uncommon diligence could have perceived them - is usually considered a far higher form of activity than merely rearranging and recycling what is already known. It seems willfully perverse of the Wikipedia administration to reverse this attitude and actually to bar the deepest thinkers and the most devoted scholars from its pages, as if they stood on a par with bigots, charlatans and commercial hirelings.
Perhaps this principle was intended as a restraint on the insertion of 'facts' which are based on unverifiable authority or no authority at all. This is certainly a persistent problem, and it is entirely understandable that the administrators should wish to install safeguards against it; but is the present formulation of the law truly the best way of doing so? It seems to me that, as long as a statement of fact is supported by a properly specified and verifiable source - one which third parties can consult for themselves, either because it is in printed circulation or because, if it consists of a manuscript, it is held by a public or academic library or else can be viewed in facsimile in printed material or online - then that statement is entirely worthy of insertion in Wikipedia; it should not matter in the least that the writer of the article has himself or herself discovered the source, as opposed to learning about it from some other work of reference. (The same applies to cases where the source is non-verbal, e.g. where it consists of a building or a natural object. The point is that, here too, others can inspect the source and satisfy themselves that it exists and that it justifies the conclusions drawn from it by the writer.) In short, primary sources should be as admissible as any other, provided they can be validated. Speculation and unsupported assertion are faults; 'original research' is neither the one nor the other, and is no fault at all.
Is there any hope that this issue can be reconsidered? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Oliver Mundy ( talk • contribs) 17:26, 22 December 2010 (UTC)
For the original poster: there is some use for OR in Wikipedia. OR cannot be included in the encyclopedia, but OR can be effective in deciding that some bit of information should be excluded. As writers and editors we use OR everyday and it always appears on talk page discussions, about content. While it is a key point of the verifiability policy that truth is not an issue, verifiability is, we also make common sense editorial decisions that verifiable bits of information that conflict with truth can be excluded, often using OR to make that decision. SchmuckyTheCat ( talk)
Go to the article on Lie algebra and start removing uncited stuff, and see what happens. The problem is that the policy pages of wikipedia, WP:V first and foremost, don't actually describe how Wikipedia is ACTUALLY written. I'm sorry about that, but it's the truth. Do I need a citation for it? S B H arris 02:35, 24 December 2010 (UTC)The real vector space of all n × n skew-hermitian matrices is closed under the commutator and forms a real Lie algebra denoted . This is the Lie algebra of the unitary group U(n).
This is not hypothetical. Just to take an example that affected many lives (it's probably the single most believed evidence that pushed the US public into supporting the 2003 Iraq war), see the article on Iraqi aluminum tubes. Just as the NYT was loudly claiming in late 2002 that the government was telling them that these tubes could not be used for anything other than nuclear programs, everybody from the Sec Def to Sec State to the VP and the President was saying the same. But-- none of them gave THEIR sources. So what is there to "verify"? If you look here (Oct 3, 2004, NYT): [3] it appears that the DOE knew in 2001 that Iraq was using these same tubes for rockets, with the exact same specs, and had been for years. But one guy in the CIA who had once worked for DOE years before, didn't believe it, and he was the source for the idea that these things had no other believable use but for uranium enrichment. But (alas) the government didn't tell anybody before the 2003 war that only one guy named Joe at the CIA had this idea, and that it was already known as of May, 2001, that Iraq was using exactly these tubes, same specs, for rockets. No mystery. And the government also knew that the other people at DOE who were uranium enrichment experts didn't think the tubes would be good for the job (these people did NOT know that they were already being used in rockets by Iraq). This info was kept that info from Colin Powell himself, because he'd never have been able to face the U.N. with a straight face, saying as an old military man that he couldn't imagine Iraqi weapons specs were so good for mere one-time anti-tank weapons. So-- all this comes back to the idea of what is a "reliable source" for information. Is the NYT a reliable source for the military uses of aluminum tubes of a certain type, in 2002? Clearly, no. Is the CIA? Clearly, no. (Not that the CIA is talking). Is the US government realiable? Clearly, no. The actual experts on gas enrichment won't talk, and they don't publish on this question in open forums.
Wikipedia, were it doing what it is supposed to be doing, would have concluded in 2002 that none of the sources it actually had for this information were reliable. In context, none are appropriate. So where is our "verifiablity"? Who do we ask who knows what they are talking about? Is the NYT reliable in 2004, but wasn't 2002? Quite possibly. Or, is it reliable on this matter, even now? And how would WE know? I'm merely using this matter as an example-- I don't want to go into a discussion about the 2003 Iraq war, rather I want to use this bit as a springboard to discuss issues of sourcing and reliability. If it's so simple a matter, just explain to me how WP's WP:V and WP:IRS policies would or should have dealt with this particular issue, in February, 2003. S B H arris 06:07, 24 December 2010 (UTC)
As a bi of aside, it is interesting that no original research was one of the first policies on Nupedia, although, as I recall, (I have a source covering this, but would need to dig it up), the reasoning was a tad different. Nupedia was to be developed by experts (including academics), and naturally original research is part of what they do, so the rule was in place to prevent them pushing their own pet theories. Which makes sense from the point of view of an encyclopedia, which should be a neutral retelling of current research, rather than a chance to present new work. Now I agree with the above statements: the main advantage is limit content to verifiable material, which is an essential process when you move away from a reliance on acknowledged experts in a field to people who may lack the expertise, as you can no longer rely on the author as a viable source, and instead need to rely on where the author gained the information. - Bilby ( talk) 13:17, 24 December 2010 (UTC)
The simple reason is that Wikipedia is not a publisher of original thought--it's a compendium of all documented knowledge. Others do the original research and we cite them. WesleyDodds ( talk) 09:50, 28 December 2010 (UTC)
Excuse me for the following sarcastic comment. Its been almost 3 months so its time for another weeks long discussion on the status of Find a grave. Here is a link to the discussion that is currently taking place, Again. on the external links noticeboard. Find a grave and IMDB.-- Kumioko ( talk) 15:10, 25 December 2010 (UTC)
A vote is currently being held at Wikipedia:External links/Noticeboard as to wether we should ban the use of the Find a grave site and remove the thousands of links we have to it on articles. Please take a moment and place your vote. -- Kumioko ( talk) 16:14, 29 December 2010 (UTC)
Wouldn't this be forum shopping? I brought up the question at the link above. It is my first time asking about it and the discussion imho is going quite well. There needs to be an end to this question about these two sites if it is questioned every few months by different editors. One problem I see is and I'm not the only one, is that there are inconsistancies the way we handle both of these sites. Having these sites spammed to multiple articles like they are is shameful. They are put in EL whether they bring info to the articles or not. There are other sites too that are constistantly added to EL that usually bring the same material as our articles have plus what other EL's have. This was just recently put together. As you can see, nothing is consistant in these sites that are added. I thought Facebook and Twitter were both not acceptable links anywhere now this new site says they are, sometimes. What is going on here? I'd appreciate some clarifications at this point. I went to the wrong place to ask these questions, and other questions, please advice me where the best place would be. My personal opinion is that both sites should be white listed, so should I go there with my opinions and see what is said there? I'd really appreciate any help I can get on this because sections like EL and Filmography are getting quite messy and the rules are getting strangely inconsistant. Thanks if advance, -- CrohnieGal Talk 21:27, 29 December 2010 (UTC)
Hi all.
First of all, I'm aware this is probably the wrong place to ask this question. In my own defence, I would suggest this is the right place to ask for the right place to ask this question. Please feel free to advise me where I might move it to a more appropriate place; I would also most appreciate your feedback about this and any other possible... If this is the wrong place, just move it to the right place.
The current {{subst:uw-username}} template generates
Hello, and welcome to Wikipedia. I noticed that your username (foo) may not meet Wikipedia's username policy. If you believe that your username does not violate our policy, please leave a note here explaining why. As an alternative, you may file for a change of username, or you may simply create a new account and use that for editing. Thank you.
To my ear, "you may file for a change of username" sounds like legalese, like there's some sort of legal process involved: pleadings, documents in triplicate "indorsed" and served, subpoenas and prolly lots more. Just one simple change would ameliorate all this. How about
Hello, and welcome to Wikipedia. I noticed that your username (foo) may not meet Wikipedia's username policy. If you believe that your username does not violate our policy, please leave a note here explaining why. As an alternative, you may ask for a change of username, or you may simply create a new account and use that for editing. Thank you.
Just sayin'-- Shirt58 ( talk) 11:54, 28 December 2010 (UTC)
I'm curious about at template, Template:Metlink Display. It is designed to display the bus route, times of operations, and bus company in Melbourne, Australia articles. For example, the Melbourne Airport is served by 4 different bus routes, and includes these in the text after discussing public transport.
A shopping mall article contained this list of buses, including a broken template:
{{Metlink Display|201}} {{Metlink Display|205}} {{Metlink Display|207}} {{Metlink Display|279}} {{Metlink Display|280}} {{Metlink Display|281}} {{Metlink Display|282}} {{Metlink Display|284}} {{Metlink Display|285}} {{Metlink Display|293}} {{Metlink Display|295}} {{Metlink Display|305}} {{Metlink Display|307}} {{Metlink Display|902}} {{Metlink Display|903}}
The display template includes links to other templates coded to fill all of the parameters. For example, the Timetable template holds 347 external links to www.metlinkmelbourne.com.au routes. The origin, destination and hours templates wikilink the same number, 300+, of articles in a switch to provide these parameters according to the timetable. There's a via template with another huge switch that will then list the route cities, hundreds of parameters in a list for type (circular, clockwise, etc.), then finally another switch template with hundreds of bus operators.
I deleted them in one article, the list above, as it seems inappropriate to display huge lists of bus routes to destinations in urban areas. It's not really the purpose of an encyclopedia, but of a tourist guide to a city. Then, when I looked at the template, it turns out many articles link to it.
Do these really belong in wikipedia articles? And, haven't we essentially downloaded the bus routes and time-tables to wikipedia? Do we need permission? -- Kleopatra ( talk) 06:13, 30 December 2010 (UTC)
I have been concerned about the addition of unsourced geographical coordinate information to articles for some time. Now, it has reached a new level with a bot adding unsourced geocoordinates to a massive number of articles. Most of these geocoord edits fall into the realm of original research with some editors going so far as to search databases for features with similar sounding names (see one such discussion here). The bot appears to be using coordinates from interwiki articles which are unsourced. I am not too worried about adding geocoords for locations which are public and protected; but, some geographic locations are sensitive. They may be located on private property; have sensitive, fragile, valuable resources and be extremely difficult or impossible to protect. Publishing geocoordinates for these sensitive locations is highly irresponsible and serves to tempt (in the vein of the familiar essay WP:BEANS) the unprepared, the ignorant and possibly the unscrupulous to trespass, and to possibly do great damage to a valuable cultural or private resource. While WP:NOR and WP:V clearly cover it, some editors (and even some bot ops) seem willing to use maps, databases, unsourced interwiki articles, or even GPS devices to add coordinates to articles which are otherwise not verifiable from reliable sources. I would like to see more editors enforcing policy and removing unsourced geocoordinates especially from sensitive locations. I have brought this here to bring wider attention to the problem. Thanks and comments? WTucker ( talk) 02:45, 31 December 2010 (UTC)
Hello! I'm the bot operator behind the bot making these edits. Of course, I'm sure it was merely an oversight on WTucker's part not to inform me about this discussion, but I would have certainly greatly appreciated if if they had done so. I'll try to read the above when I have a moment, and respond. -- The Anome ( talk) 15:14, 31 December 2010 (UTC)
OK. I've had a chance to read the above. Firstly, I'd like to say that Tagishsimon has already said most of what I wanted to say, and other commenters have said much of the rest.
I'd just add a few more points to clarify my stance on this:
Finally, if WTucker really wishes to remove this information, they can do so on all the various relevant interwiki'd articles, and the bot will not put any it back again. -- The Anome ( talk) 15:28, 31 December 2010 (UTC)
Which article are we talking about? I was able to look up the location of Conkling Cavern in the GNIS system with no difficulty, so that particular set of coordinates is neither unsourcable nor secret. The information provded by the GNIS was:
Conklings Cave, ID: 916143, Class: Mine, County: Doña Ana, State: NM, Latitude: 321124N, Longitude: 1063507W, Elevation: 4806, Map: Bishop Cap
— Carl ( CBM · talk) 19:55, 31 December 2010 (UTC)
WT has vouchsafed as as follows: "I have defended a few sensitive locations and have been successful at having some edits oversighted", but I see no policy supporting such actions. Nor, from the example of Conkling Cavern, any mention whatsoever on the talk page of the application of the non-existent policy on suppressing geo-codes. I'm troubled that an editor has set himself up as the authority on suppression of geocoords for a subset of articles, with little or no transparancy nor any accountability. I'm troubled, too, that in the one example for which we have most of the information to our fingertips, Conkling Cavern, the coordinate is, as Carl shows, above, easily accessible and in the public domain. It is difficult to understand why, under such circumstances, we would not publish this coordinate; and it is easy to suspect that other of the suppressed coordinates are of the same ilk: in the public domain, easily accessible from USGS, missing from wikipedia merely on the (however well meant) whim of WT.
Whereas WT and I may well disagree as to which geo-locatable subjects should not have coordinates, I'm prepared to accept that the possibility exists that there may be articles for which suppression of the coords is, on the whole, desirable.
I'm not prepared to accept that suppression of such coords be done in the way in which WT seems to be going about it - with nil or minimal attempt to gain consensus for the suppression, with no community oversight, with no disclosure on the article talk page.
If it is to be done, let us do it out in the open, so that we can all see what's going on. Let us declare in the talk page that the coordinate has been suppressed, state the reason and record the consensus. Let us not suppress unless we can show consensus. Let us put the articles into a (perhaps hidden) category so that we have a central location at which all such articles are listed.
I invite WT to start this process by notifying us to the articles on which coordinates have been suppressed, so that each can be considered by the comunity, and the actions taken recorded on the talk page of each.
To the extent that any policy change is required, I suggest that it be on the lines set out above: that we handle the suppression of publication of information in a very public way. -- Tagishsimon (talk) 22:20, 31 December 2010 (UTC)
Let's start with Lechuguilla Cave as that is one that the bot copied unsourced from an interwiki with no citation. As far as I can tell, coordinates for this cave are not available through GNIS. The cave is on National Park Service property and access is strictly controlled. It is deemed "significant" according to the Federal Cave Resources Protection Act and you will be hard pressed to find a NPS employee who will give you coordinates for it openly. I have never seen the coordinates published in a reliable source, just general location descriptions. The cave is well known and clearly notable so an article on WP is appropriate but coordinates are not appropriate. If it is possible to mark an article with a hidden category or something like that to prevent coordinates, this is where I would start and I was able to get an edit oversighted on this article some time back albeit with some effort. Verifiability would be difficult without visiting the site with a GPS device but I see that as something along the lines of conducting a scientific experiment to verify a statement -- in other words, OR. WTucker ( talk) 01:18, 1 January 2011 (UTC)
I have started a thread at Wikipedia talk:Revision deletion#Environmentally sensitive locations about edits when there are no reliable sources. I think that there are really two different questions here:
If we conflate these two issues, it will lead to a lot of talking past each other, I think. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 02:37, 1 January 2011 (UTC)
Wikipedia:WikiProject Aviation/Accident article notability ( | talk | history | links | watch | logs) has been edited so that it is no longer marked as a guideline. It was previously marked as a guideline. This is an automated notice of the change ( more information). -- VeblenBot ( talk) 02:00, 1 January 2011 (UTC)
Thoughts re: possible policy change on how this is done. When an image is removed from a page, many editors at various experience levels work with it, most not being the original uploader. Newer users may not know that a rationale is needed and/or how to go about providing it to get the image back. It's possible for these images to fall into "redlink" in backlog and be deleted because of lack of a rationale. If the policy was to place a notice on the article's talk page with notice to all what's needed and that the image may be deleted in X number of days if not done, it would seem to give all who edit a page adequate opportunity to correct the problem. (first try at this so please excuse any mistakes) We hope ( talk) 17:52, 1 January 2011 (UTC)
Wikipedia:WikiProject Aviation/Aircraft accidents and incidents ( | talk | history | links | watch | logs) has recently been edited to mark it as a guideline. This is an automated notice of the change ( more information). -- VeblenBot ( talk) 02:00, 1 January 2011 (UTC)
I've opened an RFC to determine what the current consensus is on the use of non-free cover images on articles of copyrighted works per current treated of the non-free content criteria policy. The RFC can be found at WT:NFC#Appropriateness of cover images per NFCC#8. -- MASEM ( t) 16:50, 3 January 2011 (UTC)
I'd like to persuade a professional body to pay an expert to edit some medical articles and review them twice a year, but there seem to be conflicting views about the appropriateness of this. My view is that, provided they follow WP:V, WP:RS and the other essential policies, there is nothing to prevent paid editing. Am I wrong? Anthony ( talk) 07:59, 2 January 2011 (UTC)
I think it would be beneficial to allow Talk pages to be used for the discussion of the content of articles, as well as just their maintenance. By this I mean not only discussing problems in formatting, citations, etc. but also what the article is talking about, e.g. people's opinions on and arguments about the pros and cons of certain philosophies.
I say this because I spend a lot of time reading philosophy articles, specifically ethics, and I think that in this field especially Wikipedia could allow for excellent discussion and advancement of thought in certain areas. Sometimes on these articles I see [by whom] or similar superscripts (indicating `weasel words' I believe. I apologise for my lack of knowledge as I'm not a contributor.) next to certain points, which aren't necessarily in need of a citation: they are points that are perfectly valid and could be attributed to the contributor. It appears that points are only likely to be added to an article if they can be referenced to an external source and/or if the author is famous or an expert in their field, when many points just as worthy could come from Wikipedia's contributors (the most notable examples come under `Criticisms' headings, where someone has replied to an argument. Often, there may be points in these replies which could just as easily be critiqued.). As such it makes sense to me for Talk pages to be used for the discussion of an article's content as well as maintenance, so that knowledge may be refined and enhanced.
This may apply primarily to philosophy articles (where thought and discussion are the means of forwarding argument, in contrast to science where research is just as important), but it is definitely useful in at least this scope. I believe that encouraging this behaviour would increase the development of ideas and thought, and the penetration of said ideas onto Wikipedia's article pages, which would be highly beneficial to both Wikipedia and it's users.
217.155.230.238 ( talk) 23:03, 3 January 2011 (UTC)
I feel I should clear up my proposal slightly. I think that there should be:
I am aware that my second point violates NOR, but from what I have read of its history this usage doesn't contradict its reason for existing. Furthermore, in these cases verifiability is also upheld. I am aware that Wikipedia is not a place for discussion, and Wikiversity's reading groups looks to provide the framework for 1, and also places this discussion into an academic environment. Technically this also gives a source, and means that Wikipedia isn't publishing original research (as that research was conducted through discussion at Wikiversity), although I'd like to reach a solution based on sensibility rather than technicality. The discussion about my proposal on Wikiversity can be found at Wikiversity:Wikiversity:Colloquium#Allow/encourage use of Talk pages for non-maintenance discussion?. Point 1 is sorted as far as I am concerned, but I cannot see any reason why Wikipedia would deny allowing sensible, new research from these discussions into Wikipedia articles. I am aware that NOR serves to help prevent crackpot research from coming into Wikipedia, but doesn't discussion in an academic environment such as Wikiversity credit the usefulness and non-crackpotiness of this research. Basically, we can use a policy of sensible, academic discussion at Wikiversity to ensure only sensible, good ideas develop which means that any resulting ideas would be fit for re-insertion into Wikipedia. A nice academic cycle. 217.155.230.238 ( talk) 12:40, 4 January 2011 (UTC)
This just isn't going to happen, both because it fundamentally conflicts with our mission to build an encyclopedia and because it would draw many resources (e.g. admin time) away from improving the encyclopedia. The "peer review" 217.155.230.238 envisions would probably not be sufficiently rigorous to accomplish anything useful, and even if it were it would still be a complete violation of WP:No original research. I don't know whether this would have a place at Wikiversity or not, but here is not the place to discuss it (take it to Wikiversity). Since this keeps coming up, I've added it to WP:PEREN: WP:PEREN#Allow discussion about the topic of the article. Anomie ⚔ 16:50, 4 January 2011 (UTC)
How about renaming the admins as "moderators". Calling a block a ban. And having a system for private messaging. Also, enable some sort of ubb-like forum method for talk pages. I mean, REALLY, why they heck do I have to feel like a computer programmer writing those silly colons? And in the edit view everything is run together. Blech! Don't tell me cause it's always been that way! And having other people edit my talk posts? Whiskey tango foxtrot? TCO ( talk) 23:41, 3 January 2011 (UTC)
Wikipedia:WikiProject Aviation/Aircraft accidents and incidents ( | talk | history | links | watch | logs) has been edited so that it is no longer marked as a guideline. It was previously marked as a guideline. This is an automated notice of the change ( more information). -- VeblenBot ( talk) 02:00, 6 January 2011 (UTC)
I recently noticed that File:Bled lake.jpg ( | talk | history | links | watch | logs) was uploaded in 2003, but overwritten in 2004 with a different image. That second image is now moved to commons, so I've reverted to the 2003 image (we don't like to delete good images). However, the old image never had a license, which I understand this was common in the early days of WP.
What was the practice at the time for tagging and/or delete such images? I don't want to blindly tag it with {{ subst:nld}}. Also, I note there were two different authors (they would both need to agree to the license, unless the latter improved version were removed).
Note: there is currently a version on commons of the 2003 file, but it doesn't give proper attribution to either author. Magog the Ogre ( talk) 23:41, 3 January 2011 (UTC)
Of course; we normally just assume the second work is the same license as the first, because the second uploader writes over top the original image with the license attached right on the page for him/her to see. However, in this case, we can't assume that because this uploader didn't attach a license to his/her derivative work, and there's no way for us to assume the second uploader would agree to the license which the first uploader should shortly give. Magog the Ogre ( talk) 23:57, 3 January 2011 (UTC)
The idea of Wikipedia is excellent. The Internet should have a comprehensive encyclopedia of academic and pop culture topics.
It doesn’t work in the real world, unfortunately.
The most common complaint is that it is open to any one to make a contribution. However, since it is continually peer-reviewed this is not the problem that it may appear to be. Bad information is corrected and may indeed lead to a more informed article/essay after editing and discussion.
No, the real problem is the designation of a score or so “SuperEditors” who have the authority to delete or change an article although they, generally, lack any knowledge base from which to make such decisions.
My expertise, lies in the history and operations of religious denominations and sects, and of comparable political parties and ideologies. I can tell anyone more than they want to know about Hardshell Baptists, or Free Will Baptists or Primitive Universalist Baptists and can equally account for the activities of Gold Democrats, Loco Focos, Hunkers or Mugwumps. Religious or political oddities are a specialty of mine.
With this background, I happened to note that while Wikipedia had articles on the Salvation Army and Volunteers of America, they lacked one on the third such church-based social welfare organization, American Rescue Workers. I, therefore, posted such an entry.
A “SuperEditor” speedily deleted it, he felt that it wasn’t important enough. The SuperEditor obviously didn’t know that the ARW was organized in 1884, that it operated many charitable programs, enlisted the assistance of thousands and served hundreds of thousands annually. Indeed, the “SuperEditor” didn’t bother to read my article. It was deleted, quite frankly, because the “SuperEditor” was woefully ignorant and unwilling to learn.
Interestingly, I also discovered that the Wikipedia “SuperEditors” approved of an article about a political organization that really doesn’t exist. Or rather to be precise, a “organization” which is the creation of one person operating out of his apartment. When informed that this organization probably doesn’t deserve its own entry due to lack of importance, the “SuperEditor” informed me that it must exist because it has a website! Anyone can have a website.
So an organization that serves several hundred thousand people a year out of six major headquarters with a 130 year history isn’t important enough for Wikipedia but one that has only one-member with his own website does.
Silly? Absurd? LAWinans ( talk) 05:28, 4 January 2011 (UTC)
I requested that the deleted article be restored to my user space. I will edit it there, if there is any usable content, then move it into article space. -- Kleopatra ( talk) 16:57, 5 January 2011 (UTC)
The article is now edited and restored to main space. American Rescue Workers. -- Kleopatra ( talk) 17:48, 5 January 2011 (UTC)
Welcome to Wikipedia! Although Einstein's notion that there is no absolute inertial frame of reference is widely accepted, the equivalent in Wikipedia (there is no absolute measure of an article's "notability") is firmly rejected. Folks in Wikipedia insist they can assess the significance of a subject, when there is no absolute measure of that. More important, there IS no need to assess significance. There is no technical limitation to the number of Wikipedia articles, or to the length, or to the list of references. Either the article gets a lot of hits, or it doesn't. Articles with few hits are invisible and should not be agonized over.
This is the approach of Google. Google doesn't assess anything about the worth or notability of a web page. A page rises to the top of a search based on a computer algorithm with no editor and their ego getting in the way.
All utopias come to an end, and Wikipedia is no exception. It has morphed from a lot of people adding to a knowledge database (albeit not perfectly), to a very unfriendly site where nothing new can be added, and emphasis is on perfecting existing articles. An editor actually told me that about all the articles worth writing already appear in Wikipedia. (Like the patent office official that said all inventions have been invented.) Another insisted that cleaning up an article was more work than originally creating the article. (Yeah, like vacuuming a room is more work than building a room.)
So all these folks reading your work, agonizing over its "worth", hitting the delete button until you grovel and jump through a lot of hoops, etc. is just a monumental waste of everyone's time. Wikipedia has gone from how can we retain as much data as possible within some generous rules, to how can we find some reason no matter how capricious to reject new data.
It is fun, easy, and safe to review other's work, stomp on it, criticize it, and say it is never quite perfect enough. You end up with call-out boxes from an amateur editor promulgating yet another made-up requirement, on about every single article.
So get your own web page, publish your stuff on the internet, and call it a day. If you went to all this trouble to create an article based on your subject matter expertise, it is significant. Don't let the amateur volunteers at Wikipedia get in your way. And don't bother fighting Wikipedia bureaucracy, spend your time creating more original works.
Any questions? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Oracle2wiki ( talk • contribs) 15:25, 5 January 2011 (UTC)
And none of this has to do with the definition of encyclopedia. So we come to "summation and summary." Those are hard words to define, except they presumably refer to works SHORTER than the original. But how much shorter? Jimbo Wales said that WP was aiming to place the SUM of all human knowledge in the hands of everyone. He might have meant SUMMARY, but he said SUM, and that has caused very much confusion, since the Sayings of Jimbo are blindly followed in some ways like the Sayings of Chairman Mao.
In any case, none of this helps us with what to summarize and what not, except for the rule that it must be something already published after decent editorial review first, elsewhere (basically). So now, it's your turn. How does any of this help our two disgruntled persons? If it doesn't help, then how-about you contribute something other than a two-sentence brush off? Let's see you think. S B H arris 21:59, 5 January 2011 (UTC)
A comment above is also worthy of thought:
. You have to admit that there's something TO that, at least. WP:NOTPAPER, after all. S B H arris 22:35, 5 January 2011 (UTC)Folks in Wikipedia insist they can assess the significance of a subject, when there is no absolute measure of that. More important, there IS no need to assess significance. There is no technical limitation to the number of Wikipedia articles, or to the length, or to the list of references. Either the article gets a lot of hits, or it doesn't. Articles with few hits are invisible and should not be agonized over.
But it is now a nice example of a community-written stub, and that is due to a bunch of real super editors who do know something about writing and sourcing an article. -- Kleopatra ( talk) 18:22, 6 January 2011 (UTC)
I've done a userpage draft of an essay: User:FormerIP/Crime. Please take a look if you have time and feedback comments on the talkpage or here, good or bad.
I think the essay would be useful because it seems that any crime that is in the news gives rise to deletion discussions as editors create separate articles about victims, suspects etc.
Thanks! -- FormerIP ( talk) 20:05, 5 January 2011 (UTC)
See Special:PrefixIndex/Wikipedia:Naming conventions. Apparently the subject page upon which these branched Wikipedia guidelines sprung out of was moved to Wikipedia:Article titles per this requested move proposal. I'm wondering whether we should move these pages to the new "Article titles" pages instead? :| TelCo NaSp Ve :| 08:22, 6 January 2011 (UTC)
Question One: In the event an edit is challenged on the basis of the letter of a policy or guideline and it is clear that under the letter of the rule the edit is improper:
My feeling is that the common sense answer to this ought to be that since policies and guidelines are the consensus of the community that they ought to prevail over any attempt to edit in contradiction of them:
(If the editor making the edit is a newcomer, I also think that the challenger should also have the obligation to at least provide links to the specific rule in question, to WP:IAR, and to WP:POLICY#Adherence.)
Corollary Question Two: If a challenged edit clearly violates the letter of policy, but the editor making the edit asserts that the edit is proper in accordance with the spirit of the rule under WP:POLICY#Adherence or that a local exception should be made under WP:IAR and, in either case, offers non-trivial reasons to support their position, does the proposed edit:
My two cents is that it should fail, first, because all edits to Wikipedia must be made by consensus if challenged and, second, because the letter of policies and guidelines is the standing consensus of the community until changed.
If this has been determined at some previous time, I'd appreciate (and only need) links to those discussions, especially if they represent consensus on the question. Best regards, TRANSPORTERMAN ( TALK) 22:37, 6 January 2011 (UTC)
I think there should be a rule or statement on wikipedia about people trying to be Judge Judy-like. I've gotten statements like that sinse I was an IP, and I don't want anyone to get that kind of message. I think it's time for those with authority to quit trying to Judge Judy people, because that will just ruin comunication, which woulden't be good. Only the real Judge Judy is Judge Judy, and I don't want me or anyone to feel that they are in a Judge Judy situation when they do something mialdly wrong because an admin or other user decides to be a Judge Judy-esk figure. Time for this to stop, that's why i'm suggesting a rule or write up about that. Even if a rule has a shortcut like WP: Judge Judy, that will do the trick as well. Thanks for your time, N.I.M. (talk) (redacted) 10:52, 6 January 2011 (UTC)
See Judge Judy, the users have left me messages that appear to have the same kind of attitude and personality as Judge Judy, and it seems like they're just trying to be authoritative in the wrong way. This has happened to me in the past, and i'm sure to others. Even if a shortcut to a policy is WP: Don't Be Judge Judy, that's alright too. I'm 100% serious about this, i promis you. I know my grammar and spelling is bad, but i'm still completely serious. N.I.M. (talk) (redacted) 11:26, 6 January 2011 (UTC)
No, that has nothing to do with it, Back when i was an IP editor, I got accusations about me that were absolutely false, and the people would not hear anything contrary to their accusations. Even when i created an account, i was accused of making those vandelism edits in august, cut-off ties thinks i'm the one who made those edits, when it was my former friend (let's call him george,as i don't have permission to give his real name), who actualy made those edits to wikipedia while using my computer to "play a game." My spelling and grammar has nothing to do with it. I don't care what people think of my grammar, that's not what i'm talking about. I'm talkking about disputes i've had in the past, where the accusers give me a Judge Judy-esk mannor of responding. N.I.M. (talk) (redacted) 00:15, 7 January 2011 (UTC)
A discussion is currently taking place about the MOS recommendation that bulleted lists should be rewritten as prose. It specifically concerns making a possible exception for sections on 'Notable residents' in articles about towns and cities. Your comments are welcome at: Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (embedded lists). Thanks. -- Kudpung ( talk) 02:33, 8 January 2011 (UTC)
I have a sweet photo that I was using in Painted turtle. I thought I was all clean having gotten the proper release, yada yada. However, an issue has come up regarding the artwork of the sign itself, the black drawing of a turtle. I have now been through a bunch of discussions of Freedom of Panoroma, de minimus, fair use; have read Canadian copyright law and parsed US and Canadian traffic manuals, etc. I would like to get some community input to see if the image can be "saved". At this point, I cut it out of the article, and even put in an AFD at Commons (killing my own child!) And of course, now someone doesn't want to delete it at Commons. Haha...can't win.
Seriously, though, I am just reaching out. Sometimes more minds help solve a problem. I don't want opinions like "looks fine to me" OR "someone raised an issue, therefore it must be wrong". If possible I want to save the image. But if not, then still useful for me as an editor to understand, better, the boundaries and reasons for them. Also, not looking for any agitation or canvassing or dramah. Just want people who have head-scratched on this stuff before to advise.
FYI: I went to a fair amount of effort (calling a naturalist) to get the image and the release, not that that matters, but, OK. As far as the usage, I think it is a very "adroit" image for my story. It's a well constructed photo. It's the right species, the right location, the right selection (didn't want something hokey like a turtle on the road). Also, it's a photo that I could see using in an article on turtle road mortality (and strategies to prevent it). that said, it is not as crucial as a cover photo of a book for a book article or the like. It's just a thoughtful additive image. Not decorative fluff OR do or die, vital.
See here for previous discussions:
TCO ( talk) 22:06, 3 January 2011 (UTC)
I think you are really getting wrapped around the axle here on copyright. The sign is deliberately placed so that people will notice it. Whatever is publicly displayed outdoors may be photographed without asking permission. Period. (That is why we have spy satellites.) Now whoever took the photo owns copyright to the photo, and can provide permissions etc. when others request to use it. The design of the turtle is likely under copyright, and if so you could not use it for other purposes without permission. If the Canadians have an issue with this, they can take it up with the US Ambassador. I recall that IBM's original BIOS software for their pc was under copyright, that Canada completely ignored. Their clone makers just copied the software. So don't feel you need to cater to Canadian sensibilities in the copyright arena.
The easiest thing for you to do is get a camera, go to the site, and capture your own image under your own copyright. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Oracle2wiki ( talk • contribs) 14:29, 5 January 2011 (UTC)
Editors who work with copyright issues, and lawyers, may be interested in the discussion at Commons:Commons:Village pump#Copyrightability of security camera recordings. Sandstein 20:27, 9 January 2011 (UTC)
User TCO started a conversation about standardizing the format of citations used on Wikipedia. Also to include a requirement to use inline citations. All interested parties are encouraged to join the conversation is at Wikipedia talk:Citing sources/example style#why not standardize on one format? - Hydroxonium ( talk) 23:22, 9 January 2011 (UTC)
Hello, I'm not 100% sure this is the right place for this, but any help would be appreciated. Recently I was reading an article, and on the left in the languages list I saw that one language (which I had never heard of) had a star beside it. I didn't know what this meant but when I hovered over the star it said that it means that it's a featured article in that language. I was curious about what constitutes a featured article in this obscure language so I clicked it. Thinking nothing of it, I left. Fast forward to today and I get an email from wikipedia in this same unintelligible (to me) language, and from what I can discern it is updating me on some kind of change to my user or talk page. Apparently merely clicking the language link set a bunch of things in motion that I was not notified about.
I would like to know: A.) How did the individual who posted on my foreign-language talk page become aware that I had clicked the link?
B.) What other information about my browsing habits are recorded, and who is notified about them and why?
C.) How can I erase that language from my global logins and erase the foreign-language talk page? I want to retain my English-language user/talk pages, but I don't want to have anything to do with that other language whatsoever.
I don't think it's a good policy to infer a bunch of things about a person's intentions when they click a language link, and it certainly bothers me that an individual was notified about this and that I received an email in reference to it.
The new page is Here.
Thanks, LuftWaffle0 ( talk) 21:30, 6 January 2011 (UTC)
Is there a backup policy in Wikipedia? I wonder, as in: Wikipedia_talk:Bot_Approvals_Group#Mediation_Committee_bot:_any_writers.3F and User_talk:AGK#Mediationbot1_fix. Policy is needed. Thanks. History2007 ( talk) 21:44, 10 January 2011 (UTC)
Whats the policy on featured article? How is a particular article selected as featured article? I am raising this question as today's featured article "Homer's Enemy" seems too specific and would be of little appeal to the general public. Having the "The Simpsons" as a featured article would have made more sense. Featuring a specific episode/season of a particular TV series spoils the professionalism of Wikipedia as an encyclopedia.
— Preceding
unsigned comment added by
Sampalex (
talk •
contribs) 04:21, 6 January 2011 (UTC)
I think there is a happy medium of specificity (and agree with you). Doing an FA on "Chemistry" is insanely difficult and probably less interesting than an article on Polonium. That said, giving the front page, (unless we are out of candidates) to an article on "bromo-chlorinated polonium compounds" would be wasting the front page of the newspaper. Obviously we are a volunteer project and people may work on what they want, as obscure as can be. That said, even though it is a value judgment, it's reasonable to think of what the reader wants and every media in the world does so. One can use google ranking or a vote (perhaps helpful for more history stuff or to overcome some popculture bias) or a panel or what have you. If the front page more often had interesting stuff rather than obscure or boring (same issue with DYK), I would read it more often. And many others would read it more too. And then this "draw" to get on the front page can be used as a tiny reward to motivate the unpaid volunteers slugging out the content. TCO ( talk) 04:34, 6 January 2011 (UTC)
It's really easy. The subject matter of the FA is of no regard in deciding whether the article makes it to FA or not. FAs are articles which are of the highest quality, irrespective of their subject matter. You are entitled to your view, of course, but for me it is a nonsense to suggest that we "spoil the professionalism of wikipedia" by selecting as FAs articles which deal with a subset of a wider subject area. As it happens, The Simpsons is also an FA and appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page as Today's featured article on December 17, 2007. So it rather looks to me as if you're merely late to the party, and woefully ill-informed. -- Tagishsimon (talk) 11:22, 6 January 2011 (UTC)
This whole discussion is predicated on a false premise, namely that today's featured article "Homer's Enemy" seems too specific and would be of little appeal to the general public. Here are the hit counts for Homer's Enemy, and the three FAs before and after it:
Conclusion - Homer's Enemy was a highly popular choice and our readers found it more interesting than the other choices of that week. Raul654 ( talk) 18:22, 12 January 2011 (UTC)
Is this correct that a single person picks today's featured article? Why? -- Kleopatra ( talk) 14:59, 12 January 2011 (UTC)
This discussion needs to be added to WP:PEREN so we don't have to keep educating each time a new editor who doesn't understand or follow WP:TFA/R comes along. Until/unless someone finds an actual problem with Raul's exemplary handling of the mainpage or the functioning of WP:TFA/R, there's little to discuss, and we just end up re-educating over and over. Kleopatra seems to be confusing the WP:FAC process with WP:TFA/R; what is the plagiarized article you refer to, Kleopatra, and where has your input at FAC been discounted? I just reviewed all of your contributions to Wikipedia:Featured article candidates subpages, and can find no such occurrence. Neither of those issues have anything to do with Raul's choosing of Today's Featured Article. SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 16:13, 12 January 2011 (UTC)
Wikipedia is primarily a project to build a free and open encyclopedia. It is also an experiment in some form of online democracy, but there is no reason to be fundamentalist about that. Hans Adler 16:43, 12 January 2011 (UTC)
PS I am going back to editing. Please feel free to accuse me of additional bad intentions on my user page. Thanks. -- Kleopatra ( talk) 16:22, 13 January 2011 (UTC)
I don't know where I was told this to begin with, but I asked again here and one person agreed that the article should be about the radio station, not its frequency. WSYN, WOMG, WLXC, WAZO and WSFM (FM) are examples of where I fixed articles where the call letters and format were moved to a new place. In the case of WLXC and WOMG, as well as WAZO and WSFM, they were swapped. When WSYN moved to its old frequency, WYAK essentially went off the air, but since a new station ( WLFF, on the former WSYN frequency) had basically the same format, I considered WLFF to be a continuation of WYAK since the formats were swapped. I did this because at least one person started putting older information about WSYN in the WSYN article, even though that station's early history was with WLFF.
There is a frequency move that has taken place. What was WUIN is now WMYT (FM) if you go by frequency and WSFM (FM) if you go by format and name. The discussion is on Talk:WSFM (FM) and what to be seems the sensible approach is being opposed. I'd like some clear guidelines. So far WSFM has not changed call letters, which doesn't help my case. Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 17:26, 11 January 2011 (UTC)
I'd like to add WORD (AM) to the list of stations which simply changed frequencies. WOLI (AM) was WSPA before it moved, but the change to the current letters came long after the swap. Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 19:01, 11 January 2011 (UTC)
In some cases I wonder whether this might be akin to a professional sport team moving to a new city and changing its name? The underlying corporate entity might remain the same, but the public face is so drastically different that it still has a new identity. That seems like an easier case to me than radio stations moving around within the same city, though I still remember a rather contentious merge discussion years past involving whether the Expos and the Nationals should have separate articles. But in any event, the point is that mere continuity of legal formalities might not provide the best or final answer as to how article content is best organized. Good luck sorting it out. ; ) postdlf ( talk) 14:58, 13 January 2011 (UTC)