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I know this has been discussed before, but I think it's time to bring the issue up again. As many of you know, the GFDL in its current form is not a good fit for Wikipedia. In fact it's a downright terrible license for the goals we have as a project. The only reason it was chosen is because it was the best option at the time (Creative Commons licenses didn't exist at the time). When I brought up this issue a long time ago, I was told that Wikipedia and the GNU Project were in discussions about updating the license. It seems nothing came of those discussions as the GFDL is still the same as it was 4 years ago. Wikipedia is BY FAR the biggest user of the GFDL. Why is it impossible for us to get some minor changes made to the license (changing the DRM and printing restrictions for example)? And if it is that difficult to get changes made through the GNU Project, why can't we just update the license ourselves? To me, the current sitatution seems akin to Intel having to get permission from the descendents of Charles Babbage to make a change to the design of their microprocessors. Why are we still stuck in the licensing dark ages??? Kaldari 22:18, 17 September 2006 (UTC)
I'm having a problem with an editor in the 2006 Thailand coup d'état and Public disapproval and protest of the 2006 Thailand coup d'état. And I'm seeking some advice and clarification about one issue in particular. This editor keeps adding the claim "The urban poor, as well as the rural farmers in the north and Isan still widely respect Thaksin". To support this, he links to this article [1] which basically makes that claim (well not quite but close enough for my purpose). He claims that this statement fulfills our requirements as it is verifiable. However it is my belief that he's wrong. It is impossible for the author to know for sure that the urban poor etc respect Thaksin therefore we can only mention that this source (and possibly other sources) made that claim (e.g. a number of sources have claimed that the...). And I believe this holds even though we don't know of any sources which specifically dispute this claim.
Firstly, is my understanding correct? Secondly, assuming it is, I would like some suggestions as to how to better explain this issue to the editor. Nil Einne 21:00, 27 September 2006 (UTC)
Your understanding seems correct to me and here's the weakness to the other peson's arguement, as I understand policy. A single newspaper article uses a single individual to illustrate a point. The article present the newspaper editor's conclusion, Chalaem's lingering respect for Thaksin -- still widely shared among the urban poor and rural farmers across the country's north and northeast.. That is a valid cite and if there were 1000 such references then lingering respect for Thaksin would be the widely held (because it is widely published) point of view. But only one newspaper article by one editor says that. this link] says that editor doesn't normally write about Thailand. Therefore, because it is a single source, then that information should be presented as coming from a single source, as being a single source. Something like, A Washington Post's writer, Anthony Faiola, said that the urban poor and rural farmers have lingering respect for Thaksin in a Washington Post article.[link to article]. Terryeo 21:24, 27 September 2006 (UTC)
I propose that an addition be made to Wikipedia:Vandalism#Types of vandalism. Specifically to mention the practice of disemvowelling as an act of vandalism. The current policy states as such:
"Changing people's comments Editing signed comments by another user to substantially change their meaning (e.g. turning someone's vote around), except when removing a personal attack (which is somewhat controversial in and of itself). Signifying that a comment is unsigned is an exception. e.g. (unsigned comment from user)"
I propose that the practice of disemvowelling be added to this text, so it would read as such: "Changing people's comments Editing (or disemvowelling) signed comments by another user to substantially change their meaning (e.g. turning someone's vote around), except when removing a personal attack (which is somewhat controversial in and of itself). Signifying that a comment is unsigned is an exception. e.g. (unsigned comment from user)"
I wish to give an example from Calton's talk page:
"If you remove sources from articles it makes it difficult for other editors to check the matters referred to. Please don't do this in order to make a point about Arbitrarion Committee decisions having to be kept to even if you don't like them. David | Talk 15:07, 9 September 2006 (UTC)"
was changed to this:
"f y rmv srcs frm rtcls t mks t dffclt fr thr dtrs t chck th mttrs rfrrd t. Pls dn't d ths n rdr t mk pnt bt rbtrrn Cmmtt dcsns hvng t b kpt t vn f y dn't lk thm. - David | Talk 15:07, 9 September 2006 (UTC)"
Not only is this uncivil, but it is an overly aggressive way to handle any situation resulting from any edit conflict.
Thank you. TruthCrusader 15:45, 26 September 2006 (UTC)
Fiddle Faddle may contain nuts. |
You know, we really need a template for all the stupid vandalism of the freaking Cattle page! Of all the dumb pages to want to vandalism. With there being so much vandalism, I do think it merit's it own template. My ideal template would be PG-13 and probably not good to have but it would get the point across. like ((cowf****r)) Please do not (mess) with the Cattle Page. It is considered vandalism and the Cows do not like it - Tom
Back to the original topic...we need this added to policy, IMHO, because if it is NOT clearly spelt out then certain editors would continue to disemvowell because they will just argue "show me where it is written that I cannot disemvowell". WHich is an argument I see a LOT on Wikipedia when it comes to certain grey areas; "Show me where it is WRITTEN down". So why NOT write it down? TruthCrusader 08:13, 28 September 2006 (UTC)
There is discussion on WT:CSD regarding deletion of blatant advertising or spam that is either (1) of a non-notable product, or (2) in userspace of a user with little or no other contribs. >Radiant< 13:06, 28 September 2006 (UTC)
On first glance 1,3-Butadiene (data page) is a nearly empty article with no introductory text or other context. On closer examination, it's meant to serve as a "subpage" of 1,3-Butadiene, to present infobox information that may be too extensive to display in the article's main infobox. There are also several related infobox "subpages". I was just wondering if there's support for this in any of our style guides? Is this sort of thing a good idea? Might it be better to store subpages that contain no prose whatsever somewhere else (eg. in template space?) so that people don't get confused and mistakenly think that most of the normal style rules apply to them? -- Interiot 20:10, 28 September 2006 (UTC)
To be honest, I dislike such pages as city square, which look like they were imported from Commons. Neither do I approve addition of similar Commons images, sometimes arranged in piles and galleries, without adding anything to the text. The article about Saint Basil's Cathedral had six images of the church. Four of these were arranged into a gallery at the bottom of the page. Today, someone started to expand the gallery with more Commons images of inferior quality. I pointed out to WP:NOT which says: "If you are interested in presenting a picture, please provide an encyclopedic context, or consider adding it to Wikimedia Commons." I was instantly reverted with the edit summary "Restore images: best part of the article". By the way, the article links to the Commons page with images of this cathedral. I would like to know the opinion of others — how many images are appropriate for a short page about a church? Is six enough? Perhaps sixteen? Twenty six? Is there a guideline as to this? -- Ghirla -трёп- 10:36, 26 September 2006 (UTC)
On city square i think the massive wodge of a gallery should go, taking three of the best image into the article proper - the commons link will take the user to a large selection of additional images. Regardless is a square is not notable enough to have it own article then it probably should not be in that massive gallery (if it's kept).
On Saint Basil's Cathedral I do not feel the four additional images in the gallery at the bottom add anything to those already in the article itself. I'd also remove the explicit thumbnail sizing on the images (it's far too big). The article could probably handle three images (at the default thumbnail sizes), but those additional ones aren't great. Thanks/ wangi 12:55, 26 September 2006 (UTC)
Somehow I feel the logo used in the userboxes and the project notices for that project should be changed, the main reason being that it's too similar to Wikimedia's logo and therefore can't be released into the public domain. Compare what happened to the Counter Vandalism Unit's logo some time ago. Peter O. ( Talk) 00:32, 29 September 2006 (UTC)
Wikipe-tan, a character created as a moé anthropomorphism of Wikipedia and used as an unofficial mascot, was promoted to featured image status ( debate). The question is thus whether or not it is acceptable for such an image, which is by its nature a self-reference, to be featured on the main page (currently scheduled for October 2).
Please comment at Wikipedia talk:Picture of the day#Wikipe-tan as POTD?. Dragons flight 01:35, 29 September 2006 (UTC)
The page has been changed in the last couple days to include many new things (take a look at this dif). Some of the new things don't really fit in with "owning" an article though. Minor changes, such as formatting, image size and placement, choice of words, and other mundane edits are argued about on a daily basis by one editor seems to be kind of a false indication. If formatting is done wrong on an article, I fix it, to make the article look better. Image size and placement can't be considered owning the article, especially if the image is too big. Sometimes, there are better words to describe something. The articles are for the readers after all, not for the editors alone. Since WP:OWN is an important policy, I believe we should get at least some community consensus before any changes are made. - Royalguard11( Talk· Desk) 02:07, 24 September 2006 (UTC)
Hi. An editor at Talk:Vlaams Belang (a Dutch language Belgian political party) came up with the interesting remark that a number of quotes, used in the article, are in fact translated from Dutch into English by a Wikipedia editor, which according to him might constitute WP:OR.
Another remark, noted several times before, is that this article (and a number of other articles on Dutch language subjects) used quite a lot of foreign (Dutch and French) language sources (that are not being translated, of course).
I don't seem to find a policy about this. Is there ?
What is the general feeling ? Does using self-translated quotes constitute original research ?
Thanks. -- LucVerhelst 20:32, 28 September 2006 (UTC)
“ | Because this is the English Wikipedia, English-language sources should be given whenever possible, and should always be used in preference to other language sources of equal calibre. However, do give references in other languages where appropriate. If quoting from a different language source, an English translation should be given with the original-language quote beside it. | ” |
But translating a political statement isn't like translating a scientific statement. A quote where someone says they deliberately lost a case for propaganda reasons, for instance, could very well have nuances of wording which make it not mean exactly what it seems to mean. A scientific or historical quote won't.
It's true that summarizing an already English quote raises similar issues yet is accepted. But my guess is that if the quote was originally English, we would have recognized the issues and not summarized it either. When a quote is used to condemn someone by their own words, we quote, we don't summarize.
(I don't know Dutch. If the original is so clear that the translator doesn't need to interpret it, ignore this...) Ken Arromdee 21:24, 28 September 2006 (UTC)
See Wikipedia:Village_pump_(proposals)#Male_Domination.3F.
I think it's getting to the point where perhaps we all need to touch base and work out where the common ground on this project is. Our policy and guideline pages are growing out of control and becoming areas of focus as much as the actual encyclopedia is, and I think maybe it's time to rewrite them and try to keep it simple. It looks like we have gone too far down the road of trying to detail every possible instance of what might be an unreliable source, or what might be original research, and maybe it's time to just let the pages breathe and trust our own common sense. Steve block Talk 12:12, 27 September 2006 (UTC)
The first draft of the new version of the GFDL (which all Wikipedia text content is licensed under) was released yesterday. If you are interested in Wikipedia licensing issues, please visit this page and join the discussion. This is very exciting news for Wikipedia! Kaldari 23:08, 27 September 2006 (UTC)
Here is an interesting except from the GFDL2 draft:
“ | 8b. WIKI RELICENSING If the Work was previously published, with no Cover Texts, no Invariant Sections, and no Acknowledgements or Dedications or Endorsements section, in a system for massive public collaboration under version 1.2 of this License, and if all the material in the Work was either initially developed in that collaboration system or had been imported into it before 1 June 2006, then you may relicense the Work under the GNU Wiki License. |
” |
Kaldari 23:15, 27 September 2006 (UTC)
It's also important that Wikipedians take a look at section 6a:
“ | 6a. EXCERPTS You may publish a work, a Modified Version, or a collection, of up to 20,000 characters of text (excluding formatting mark-up) in electronic form, or up to 12 normal printed pages, or up to a minute of audio or video, as an Excerpt. An Excerpt follows the applicable rules of this license, except that the following required materials--the copy of this license, title page materials, historical copyright notices, warranty disclaimers, and any required sections--may be replaced by one or more publicly accessible URLs referring to the same materials. |
” |
This section was ostensibly added to placate Wikipedia so that individual articles could be excerpted from Wikipedia without having to include pages of licensing material. The problem is that "20,000 characters" is tiny. An average Featured Article weighs in at about 50,000 characters, and longer articles often exceed 100,000 characters (e.g. Vietnam War: 142,958 chars; Paleoconservatism: 190,236 chars). Also 20,000 characters in the Chinese Wikipedia counts for a lot more information than 20,000 characters in the English Wikipedia. We should lobby to have this limit changed from "20,000 characters" to "20,000 words". Kaldari 00:27, 28 September 2006 (UTC)
Does anyone know where Danny Wood went to law school? What bar memberships he possesses? -- GreenCommander81 03:09, 29 September 2006 (UTC)
Yeah whatever, brah... GreenCommander81 03:30, 29 September 2006 (UTC)
Danny is most certainly not a lawyer. I think Angela is right - GreenCommander81 is probably confusing him with Brad, who is a lawyer and is Wikimedia's interim executive director. Raul654 12:57, 29 September 2006 (UTC)
Well the point i'm trying to make is why does everyone think, not only on Wikipedia but also on Slashdot and other forums, that people trolling are bored young while males? Haven't you noticed that the average troll is quite articulate and intelligent? I posit to you, kind sir, that many of those you deride as "trolls" are indeed college graduates, and even some professionals. I know of a troll that operated on this very medium last year to be a retired County Court judge in Florida. Just a thought my man... let's tee it up! -- GreenCommander81 03:58, 29 September 2006 (UTC)!
Asking provacative and pointless questions [2] [3] [4] [5] in as public of a venue as you can get [6], and then walking away can certainly count as trolling. -- Interiot 14:03, 29 September 2006 (UTC)
We appear to have a few categories that are collections of articles that have no claim to notability (e.g. a brand of detergent). I won't claim that *everything* in these categories needs to go away, but I don't think 90% would be too bold. For starters, take a look at Category:Brand_name_products_stubs. I'm not sure if the best means to this end would be to simply go ahead and exercise judgement in deleting things, individually listing the hundreds of articles on AfD (gah, hopefully not), or something else. Thoughts? -- Improv 05:04, 15 September 2006 (UTC)
Considering that several people might want to keep these things in some form, a less drastic approach might be to merge the products (short articles anyway) with the company which makes them. After all, if somebody is interested in a company, it is not far-fetched that they'll seek info on their products, but very short stubs on them looks unprofessional. If the article is too long a "list of products by..." might be useful for those who are interested. For the record, I love cruft just as much as Tom Lehrer claimed to love smut in his song. Sjakkalle (Check!) 08:15, 15 September 2006 (UTC)
Widely distributed products deserve articles, as do those that are significant within a single country. Remember that we must work to counter systematic bias, and you may not be aware of foriegn products. That said, a stub cull is probably needed, removing those stubs without enough details to allow it to be properly expanded (such as Duotang) and keeping those giving enough information to allow a full article to be built ( EverGirl, for example). I am personally in favour of lists in the place of stubs, and so merging should be considered. Mass listings on AfD are generally discouraged, and result in horrible messes that often end up overturned. Prodding those stubs without enough contextual information would be wise, even better would be a CSD catagory for "stub without enough information to allow an article to be built". For now I would advise that you prod those stubs without enough information to build an article from. LinaMishima 15:41, 15 September 2006 (UTC)
I've found myself thinking that we need to have a discussion, is notability something wikipedia needs? Please note that we are not asking how to determine notability or whether or not certian criteria regarding notability is correct, just if the concept is needed on wikipedia. Does notability stand on its own two feet? Notability has been a proposed policy for a while, yet we have never really discussed it. ALKIVAR ™ 05:36, 30 September 2006 (UTC)
I'm concerned about the misunderstandings and potentials for abuse arising from this template and its series Template:Test3a etc. The text of these warning templates implies that "removing content" is automatically "considered vandalism". This is in contradiction to Wikipedia:Vandalism#What vandalism is not, and it has given rise to a widespread myth about a non-existant "don't-remove-content" policy. Please comment on Template talk:Test2a. Fut.Perf. ☼ 07:06, 30 September 2006 (UTC)
So I'm planning to start up a small, focused public wiki (non-commercial) that I anticipate will have at least a little bit of overlap with Wikipedia.
As a part of the process of bootstrapping and seeding it with starter articles, I was thinking of grabbing some relevant content from Wikipedia and adapting it for my needs. I assume, for starters, that doing so is in keeping with the GFDL, provided it's republished under GFDL.
Likewise, my hope would be that we would eventually develop content that might be appropriate for a general interest encyclopedia, which we could then port to Wikipedia (pruning it down to general interest length). Again, I assume this is not an issue if ours is published under the GFDL.
But let's say I don't wish to encumber future iterations (print edition?) with the unweildy GFDL manifesto and opt for something like a CC share-alike license...
I take it that the first half of the above (copping Wikipedia content) would be right out—that GFDL content simply can't be republished under CC-by-sa. (Or is there some viable work-around?)
But what about republishing CC-by-sa content to Wikipedia? CC share alike says "you may distribute the resulting work only under a license identical to this one." Does Wikipedia's GFDL qualify as "identical" in this respect?
75.21.89.221 18:55, 30 September 2006 (UTC)
Deco writes: "Any pair of copyleft licenses are fundamentally incompatible."
Wjhonson writes: "In this case *wholely derivative* being perhaps redundant is significant... Derivative in this case, would mean, 'consisting of material entirely retrieved from another work'."
Carnildo: "For articles with no anon contributers and only a few registered authors, you can request that the author release their contributions under another license."
75.22.206.71 21:25, 30 September 2006 (UTC)
I would add ("I" being both 75.21.89.221 and 75.22.206.71 from above) that the share-alike portion of
this CC-by-sa draft reads, "you may distribute the resulting work only under this license" where the final version says, "... a license identical to this one." This change at least suggests to me that CC might not view their license as necessarily "fundamentally incompatible" with other potential copyleft licenses.
So I'll ask again: can CC-by-sa content be republished under GFDL? Both are considered share-alike licenses in some respect. Where does "identity" between licenses begin and end?
Where my law dogs at?
64.109.248.198 00:09, 1 October 2006 (UTC)
I'm not 100% sure I'm posting in the correct spot but I would like to suugest a new wikipedia policy. Namely that, " Exonyms should only be used as a last resort." I came to this conclusion by recently stumbling onto the debate at the Meissen page, which concerns the correct spelling of the town (ss vs ß). It seems to me, regardless of the original title of the created article, if the article deals with a proper name then the native spelling should be used whenever possible, espcially if it won't cause undo confusion among English speakers. Naufana: Talk 03:13, 21 September 2006 (UTC)
Sorry, this is the English Wikipedia. It is our policy to use the most commonly known name in the English language. Would you have our Germany article at Deutschland? User:Zoe| (talk) 03:14, 21 September 2006 (UTC)
What Zoe says! What good could come out of using Meißen or Deutschland or Wien? Just good ol' confusion for the users. Most of the geography pages state the local name in the first line or two of the text anyways and the native name is often made a redirect. This is really a non-issue. Pascal.Tesson 03:21, 21 September 2006 (UTC)
I see country names can be English, but city names should be as close as possible to the local language of the city. English might have "English" versions of some cities, but doesnt have English versions of all cities, and so usually has to use the local names. Having to switch back and forth between sometimes using an English cognate and sometimes not creates even more confusion. Consistency is more important. For example, all names for German cities, towns, villages, hamlets, lakes, rivers, brooks, streams, meadows, regions, mountains, hills, etc., should be according to their German names. Thus the article can have the German city name, Wien. Notable English cognates such as Vienna can redirect to Wien. The only exception is, the English alphabet must be used for English articles. For German, this isnt a problem, thus Meissen (not Meißen). The proper spelling in the local alphabet can be mentioned in the article. -- Haldrik 03:48, 21 September 2006 (UTC)
"But we don't actually care what name he prefers to use." But the fact is, the article is under the self-designated name. "It was indeed formerly known in english as Peking but the standard has been switched to Beijing." Chinese isnt the only language whose naming convention standard is switching to the local language. -- Haldrik 05:37, 21 September 2006 (UTC)
And - how do I put a ß into a word when I'm searching for it? And what about Αθήνα? I think it's Athens & Meissen! Saltmarsh 05:57, 21 September 2006 (UTC)
"How do I put a ß into a word when I'm searching for it?" One doesnt. The standard equivalent is used: a ss. The official equivalent for Αθήνα, according to the Greek government, is Athina. -- Haldrik 06:06, 21 September 2006 (UTC)
But now you are trying to impose your righteous point of view on users. Wikipedia is not a place to try and force every english speaker to use Wien instead of Vienna. Whether you like it or not, Vienna has been the standard name used in english for centuries. In French that would be Vienne, in Spanish Viena and so on. And again, you seem to be missing that point, the native name is always given in the first line of the article. What point would there be to categories if they were filled with 北京. Pascal.Tesson 06:30, 21 September 2006 (UTC)
A better example is the Italian city Torino. The actual local name in Italian is Torino. The English cognate is Turin as in the "Shroud of Turin" or in the "Turin Canon" ("Turin Papyrus of Kings"). The article for this city is still "Turin". However even as we speak the official English name for this city has switched over to the local name Torino since its official use for the Olympics. (Not Turin). For example: NBC Olympic coverage. This switch to the local name as the standard is inevitable. -- Haldrik 06:55, 21 September 2006 (UTC)
Categories don't contain redirects. Also, Torino is indeed an exception where Torino is starting to become standard. But if you want to go the Olympics route, it was the Athens Olympic games, not the Athina olympic games on NBC. Pascal.Tesson 07:04, 21 September 2006 (UTC)
If the local name is always the standard, then there is never a surprise. If the standard is sometimes an archaic English cognate or sometimes a contemporary journalistic local name, then there will always be surprises. -- Haldrik 07:07, 21 September 2006 (UTC)
"Whose POV do we endorse"? POV is a serious problem. Using the defacto local name helps reduce this problem. (It is Iran, not Persia, whether we like it or not, and until it's changed.) Even when the local name is still in question, it's irrelevant to the policy of using the local name. Is it "Israel" or is it "Palestine"? It's frustrating to write articles on this because the usages of these placenames are complex and still fluid. Nevertheless, whichever is prefered, the policy would have "Yisrael" and "Falastina" (assuming the local names would be used for nation states too). Haldrik 07:46, 21 September 2006 (UTC)
"It's name in English is Vienna, not Wien." Well for example, say your standing in the German city Wien/Vienna, and (hypothetically) you are standing on the corner of "Wien Street" and "Meunchen Road". Do you actually call these roads by their names "Wien Street" and "Meunchen Road", or do you switch over to the archaic English cognate and call them "Vienna Street" and "Munich Road"? These kinds of complications are extremely confusing, when you actually have to refer to these names in real life. Simply using the local name as the standard solves all of these kinds of problems. -- Haldrik 08:08, 21 September 2006 (UTC)
Go to the English Google Maps website and type in the "Vienna" search. See what happens!!! -- Haldrik 08:26, 21 September 2006 (UTC)
Haldrik, did you ever reply to the issue of things like Chinese cities? Should Beijing be listed under its name using the Chinese alphabet? Or should it, instead, be listed under the standard english name of Beijing?
Unless you're prepared to say that an english encyclopedia should list it as 北京, you really don't have a leg to stand on. So, which is it? Should Beijing be listed as 北京, or should Wien be listed as Vienna?
Bladestorm 09:33, 21 September 2006 (UTC)
A counterproposal: English Wikipedia should use non-ASCII titles for articles only as a last resort. Every foreign name can be transliterated unambiguously. Using non-ASCII characters creates only problems to Unicode-disabled people, and I see no real advantage of using them - local name is always displayed in the first paragraph. Grue 11:15, 21 September 2006 (UTC)
Can we all agree that this is a rejected proposal? -- tjstrf 15:34, 21 September 2006 (UTC)
Maybe I wasn't clear enough, the last line i wrote was "espcially if it won't cause undo confusion among English speakers." I think it's obvious that established names should probably be left as the exonym (exonym as a last resort was in the title) but for lesser known places the original name should be used. As for being unable to type an "ß," well redirects can bring you from "meissen" to "meißen" and the "ß" is located in the characters list below (second character in the second line) if it is needed in editing. Thanks Naufana: Talk 16:38, 21 September 2006 (UTC)
Check out this diff. I put it in, two days later it got removed.
Cons to allowing subnational entities in sister cities: many.
Pros to allowing subnational entities in sister cities: nobody knows where "Faribault" is (it's in Minnesota).
Discuss! Zweifel 10:46, 1 October 2006 (UTC)
Recently, above, the idea was raised of using advertisements on Wikipedia to raise funds for charity. I don't think this is a good idea, primarily because any sort of commercial advertisement gives the appearance of bias - that these companies could control content by threatening to withdraw advertising funds. But here's a rather different idea.
In Seattle there is a public radio station that plays dance music run by a high school called C89.5. They have a large listenership, but have no advertisements at all; instead, they have "public service announcements", which briefly describe volunteer opportunities in the community, environmental issues, and so on. I wonder if Wikipedia contributors would be willing to tolerate unpaid "public service" advertisements for charitable organizations such as the Red Cross, especially during times of crisis such as natural disasters when they solicit donations. The organization would supply no money for the service, but it would still have a positive impact on the world community. Just a thought? Deco 03:28, 14 September 2006 (UTC)
Several editors have said that they will leave if Wikipedia goes commercial. They see no reason why they should give their free labor to a commercial enterprise. User:Zoe| (talk) 01:03, 16 September 2006 (UTC)
I'm forever frustrated by not learning from any reference work other than a dictionary how the headword is pronounced. I often consult encyclopedic - or reference - dictionaries, which do give a pronunciation guide (because they are chiefly dictionaries and follow the dictionary format). Would it not be an idea for Wikipedia to be (if, indeed, this is the case) the first to do so? Those people who have contributed articles (and I realise some will have contributed a lot) could go back and add a small edit, and, over a couple of years or so, articles would have a pronunciation guide for their headwords.
Andy Armitage
Is there any policy for or against hiding information in navigation boxes? For example the nav-boxes used on United States. → A z a Toth 15:54, 1 October 2006 (UTC)
The recent (and I believe worthwhile but that's beyond the point) proposal to replace the old notability essay with a guideline page reflecting the actual use of notability in the deletion process has led to a lame revert war among experienced editors and admins. The edit warring concerns whether or not the proposal is a proposal or a guideline. One can see that the talk page has become a nasty screaming match where people have pretty much stopped to listen to one another. I think this urgently requires the intervention of cooler heads. Pascal.Tesson 21:36, 1 October 2006 (UTC)
Wikipedia's very own dreaded "n-word" is being discussed over at the proposed rejected disputed
Wikipedia:Non-notability. I've just set up a sort of straw-poll thingy at
Wikipedia talk:Non-notability#Information-gathering straw-poll, and I invite people who are interested in this issue to contribute their opinions so we may gauge how the community of Wikipedians feels about notability as an inclusion criterion.
Have a great day, and remember, voting is evil! :) - GTBacchus( talk) 22:17, 1 October 2006 (UTC)
I now have user accounts on three Wikipedia projects: en, fr and commons. I don't visit each of them on a daily basis, so would it be acceptable to redirect the other two to my talk page on en? My concern is that users would then be unable to sign their names appropiately without explicitly typing in their signature. Is there a better solution to this? (Please reply on my talk page.) -- INTRIGUEBLUE ( talk| contribs) 07:40, 2 October 2006 (UTC)
I can't find a page explainig if it's a policy about moving pages i.e. from wikipedia to wiktionary. We just added on It.wiki and I would to compare it between the mayors project. Bye The Doc post... 13:45, 2 October 2006 (UTC)
Moved to WP:ANI, as there doesn't appear to be any actual policy question or discussion taking place. Ξxtreme Unction| yakkity yak 20:31, 2 October 2006 (UTC)
What's the policy on en.wikipedia regarding the histories of merged pages? Are the histories merged into the destination, or do they just go "poof"?
I'm actually asking this as a wikibooks admin... I discovered that this could indeed be done several weeks ago, but I'm not sure whether it's worth the bother and/or potential upset if an editor comes across the page during the process of merging (it involves merging the stuff into the destination, then deleting the article, then moving the merged article to the space, then restoring all versions, and finally updating to the most recent version). Is it done here? -- SB_Johnny| talk| books 15:41, 2 October 2006 (UTC)
My watchlist is mostly fruits and vegetables (I'm a farmer and these are the things I'm interested in), and many of these seem to have rapidly growing sections on "trivia" or "this fruit in popular culture".
I hate to be the stick-in-the-mud complaining about how fun (and often silly) trivia isn't really encyclopedic, but fun (and often silly) trivia really just isn't encyclopedic. (For the latest example, see radish). -- SB_Johnny| talk| books 23:12, 25 September 2006 (UTC)
As a Good Article reviewer, a designated Trivia section or bullet point "In popular culture" list is generally frowned upon. Ideally anything that is relevant or encyclopedic about the topic should find its way into the main sections of the article. However, I have seen well written "In popular culture" sections that are presented in a prose format instead of the bullet point list. Agne 00:04, 26 September 2006 (UTC)
See: Wikipedia:Navigational boxes → A z a Toth 12:46, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
I'd like to ask any wikipedians who are interested in the transwikiing of "how-to" type articles and/or wikipedians who are hawkish about the GFDL to please express your opinion about enabling import from wikipedia to wikibooks.
For those unfamiliar with the import tool, this allows import of wikipedia articles to wikibooks with the page histories, as opposed to the current copy-paste method which either copies and pastes the material (e.g. b:talk:Transwiki:Dishwasher Repair) or just leaves a link to the original page history (e.g. b:talk:A Wikimanual of Gardening/Rosa multiflora).
There hasn't been much support voiced on wikibooks because (a) most wikibookians aren't particularly interested in policy, and (b) most wikibookians aren't too thrilled about having things transwikied (and then summarily abandoned as stubs) from wikipedia (though I' plan to do a bit of userpage spamming there over the next few days to get support... the only other person who voiced support so far only did so to support me (personally), and plenty of others will vote for that reason since I'm the only admin who gives much of a hoot about our how-to books). (← please don't read any bitterness into this, I really like the "bedroom community" quality of wikibooks (part of why I'm much more at home there than here), it's just that the foundation asked me to rally support, and I'll get more votes quicker asking the wikipedians than the wikibookians. This affects us1 (the "us" that includes me as a wikipedian) probably more than it does us2 (the "us" that includes me as a wikibookian... I lead a confused double-life as far as wikizenship is concerned).
Enabling import on wikibooks would achieve 2 important goals:
Just to clarify why I'm the one making the request here:
Just a note towards a further discussion (assuming the tools are enabled): the "main actors" of the wikibooks community would be a lot more comfortable about hosting transwikis from wikipedia if we1 made it a policy that all transwikis be done this way, since this would ensure that an admin (who at least in theory is familiar with stub-tagging and the WB categories) will make sure it goes where it should, rather than just sitting there. -- SB_Johnny| talk| books 16:14, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
I have to say that something occurred to me lately. Last year, it was standard policy here that only vandals could be unilaterally indefblocked, while those engaged in "trolling" sans-vandalism could only be indefblocked by Jimbo or the ArbCom. see Wikipedia_talk:Dealing_with_disruptive_or_antisocial_editors (a debate from 2004) In 2005 and before, there existed much long-term obvious trolling, and many of those accounts became somewhat notorious, as ArbCom could literally take months to ban even an obvious troll (see User:Lir, User:Rainbowwarrior1977, User:CheeseDreams, and many other "old school" trolls). In some cases, the arbcom would only warn an obvious troll, like that "Anthony DiPierillo" guy or whatever his name was.
Now, however, many attempts at trolling are blocked in the bud by admins before the troll accounts have time to establish a trolling reputation and nobody complains. I remember people would raise holy hell about "process" and "only ArbCom can do that" when a well-meaning admin would unilaterally ban an obvious troll as late as the fall of 2005 (like User:Wiki_brah). In fact, the only "notorious" troll in 2006 that seemed to defy being quickly banned outright was User:Mistress Selina Kyle, who indeed ended up being banned without Arbcom sanction in the end. So what caused this change? Was there an official policy shift? Pardon me, I've only been observing Wikipedia infrequently this year (new job, etc). Thanks in advance, -- Yolanda82 23:05, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
While reading Bankruptcy it occured to me that many wiki articles offer information that could be misconstrued as Legal or Medical advice. It seems to me that it would be a VERY good idea to include a template for a header saying something along the lines of "This article contains information on a Legal/Medical topic. This article is informational only, and under no circumstances should serve as a replacement for professional advice." And then have a little picture of a Caduceus or Lady Justice. That or something like the spoiler warning, except we'll call it a liability warning. Does this seem important to anyone else? -- Niro5 17:13, 4 October 2006 (UTC)
Understandable, but I was unable to find these disclaimers until they were pointed out to me just now. I have used Wikipedia before, and I couldn't find them; what about new users? I understand that the lack of a disclaimer where there are disclaimers might lead to trouble, but perhaps the blanket disclaimer should be easier to find.-- Niro5 18:05, 4 October 2006 (UTC)
A very rough idea, born of the discussion on Wikipedia:Expert Retention.
It's Wikipedia:User versions, for an idea on a way to deal with edit creep, and better enable expert editors to monitor content in their subject area. Among other things. It's an extension/generalization to the "stable versions" system. And it's completely democratic, and in the wiki spirit. I'm mentioning it on both VP:POL and VP:TECH as it has implications for both.
It is very rough at this point, so please don't consider it a proposed policy, yet.
-- EngineerScotty 19:55, 4 October 2006 (UTC)
Seriously, all you folks who spend your days hunting them down and eliminating them.... where will new articles come from? Gzuckier 16:35, 4 October 2006 (UTC)
Aroma amore was tagged for AFD but not completed. Do I complete it or do I just remove the tag? It doesn't document why it was nominated, which makes completion of the nomination difficult. RJFJR 21:01, 5 October 2006 (UTC)
There is a group of wikipedians making edits whose meaning escapes me. For instance, User:Edton routinely makes edits like this, this, or this. When I ask him to explain his grievances, he responds in a defiant tone. Is there any policy behind these edits? How should we distinguish helpful edits from meaningless? -- Ghirla -трёп- 11:02, 5 October 2006 (UTC)
How about this guy: http://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Special:Contributions&target=207.74.23.67
After lots of warnings, and one block, his new, preferred form of vandalism appears to be to vandalise a page, and then undo the vandalism two minutes later. I guess it saves the rest of us the bother, but it's not exactly helpful. Someone may well have been viewing the page at that point. It seems to be behaviour deliberately designed to vandalise without being blocked.
Merlinme 14:59, 5 October 2006 (UTC)
Are we looking at the same user? The four most recent 'contributions' of 207.74.23.67: 1) change the Italian definition of Duce to be 'woman', 2) change it back to 'leader' literally one minute later. 3) Add the name 'Doug Beyer' to the Seven Deadly Sins section on Sloth. 4) Remove it one minute later.
Merlinme 15:13, 5 October 2006 (UTC)
Fair enough, I guess. And going back down the contributions, there are a few useful edits. How do you know it's a school IP?
Merlinme 15:51, 5 October 2006 (UTC)
So much for the IPs. Back to the first chap: he now promises to double or treble his efforts. Clearly a man (or woman) with a mission! -- Hoary 15:57, 5 October 2006 (UTC)
Wikipedia prides itself on being a collaborative venture and often states that anyone can contribute. This does not take into account the proprietary attitude which some editors display to what they regard as their articles. This can lead to the alienation of potentially useful new editors, who often see their work deleted and labelled irrelevant or inappropriate. One way possibly of tackling the problem of "ownership" might be to limit the number of edits which any editor may perform per day on any given page. It would ensure that most editors are careful about only hitting "save" when they are certain that they have finished editing a particular article - the history logs of articles are littered with records of editing that are trivial or malicious. It would also take some of the traffic pressure off Wikipedia servers. The number of edits per day per article could also work on a sliding scale where edit allocations are made according to the editor's history (good or bad) and according to their Wikipedia function. Details would have to be worked out by better minds than mine, but I do think the idea could be made to work well, with very few negative consequences. Have an excellent day.... Paul venter 13:25, 5 October 2006 (UTC)
The worst thing about a rule like this is that it might force you to leave an article vandalised because you are out of reverts, or if you screw something up, you may be unable to fix it. And, of course, as has been said already, it will also increase the likelihood of edit conflicts, if you are copy-editing an article. Article ownership, as described here, is already limited by the 3-revert rule, so any change would restrict editors to 2 or fewer edits per page per day. That is unworkable, and totally disproportionate to the problem. Guettarda 17:04, 5 October 2006 (UTC)
There is currently active discussions being held on Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/TawkerbotTorA and Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/TawkerbotTorA related to creating an automated account to be given sysop rights. Currently there are no such accounts. To prevent a ForestFire please comment on the aforementioned pages if interested. Thank you, — xaosflux Talk 05:08, 6 October 2006 (UTC)
I have a modest proposal at User:AxelBoldt/Real name proposal, restricting editing of encyclopedia articles to people who are willing to provide their verifiable real name. Cheers, AxelBoldt 06:23, 5 September 2006 (UTC)
One of the strongest arguments you will have is the idea that the information is made publically accessible. Given this is generally discouraged online, and it would place serious freedom of speech problems on editors within certain reigemes, this is not only understandable but an entirely valid point. A better idea is that of privately confirmed existance, either by peers or via the wikimedia foundation. Only the peers or the foundation would know this information, and would be bound to keep it private. Much of what would be useful to establish is a level of known expert authority for use in such things as peer review. LinaMishima 12:24, 5 September 2006 (UTC)
I'm worried about NPOV disputes and intimidation. ColourBurst 14:50, 5 September 2006 (UTC)
Only users who are signed-in ... may edit the encyclopedia. This is one of the most common perennial proposals, and it's really really unlikely to ever happen. -- Interiot 15:23, 5 September 2006 (UTC)
Would those of you commenting in this section about "Do not force people to show their real names" pleae repeat what you are saying a little lower on the page, in the section on Tor and China? -- Keybounce 20:58, 19 September 2006 (UTC)
Oh, come now, the 15 or so of us that would be left after this passed could have a grand old time. Dragons flight 05:04, 22 September 2006 (UTC)
I don't think that this is a truly workable proposal. Firstly, as has been pointed out, it is to a certain extent a rehash of 'only logged-in users should edit', which is a bad idea for a variety of reasons. Secondly, it may expose our contributors to an inappropriate level of personal scrutiny. I edit Wikipedia and handle OTRS under my real name, and was recently personally threatened by a correspondent because we wouldn't delete a notable article (amongst other things, he tried to have my research funding suspended). This isn't a risk that every Wikipedian should be forced to take. --ⁿɡ͡b Nick Boalch\ talk 08:02, 25 September 2006 (UTC)
If this were enforced, I would stop editing, and I am sure a large number of other editors also do so. It is completly unworkable, and WP:CREEP. --GW_Simulations User Page | Talk 12:30, 1 October 2006 (UTC)
Yes, it would be unworkable. Drjem3 21:56, 1 October 2006 (UTC)
Strongly oppose - I would leave wikipedia rather than reveal my real name. -- Charlesknight 22:00, 1 October 2006 (UTC)
Strongly Oppose:
Fiddle Faddle 22:16, 1 October 2006 (UTC)
I strongly oppose as well. I can articulate detailed reasoning if desired, but I think it's already snowball-level clear that consensus is against this. Newyorkbrad 22:29, 1 October 2006 (UTC)
The suggestion is really only interesting in that it is founded on such a profound misunderstanding of how both the Internet and the Wiki function. Banno 00:18, 2 October 2006 (UTC)
Accountability is one of the fundamental flaws frequently pointed out about Wikipedia. But I don't think that this proposal solves it. We already have a problem verifying the truthiness of real names. -- Malber ( talk • contribs) 18:35, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
Sounds like a good idea to me. At least, to become a regular contributor and discuss policy issues, deletion, etc. you should be required to provide your real name to the foundation. Tizio, Caio, Sempronio 16:16, 6 October 2006 (UTC)
Admittedly this borrows a bit from the farming and selling of accounts for use in online gaming such as "Worlds of Warcraft" but I must admit that my idea is rather crafty: Employ several impoverished people (better yet children or students) at a pittance to register new accounts on Wikipedia. Have them make simple yet helpful edits to articles daily over four to six months. Start having them post simple votes on AfD and other forums to improve their visibiliy in the Wikipedia community. Once an account's edit count is 1500+, they will nominate themselves for adminship, and once a few are made admins, the new "farmed" admin accounts can nominate other prospective accounts for admin. Granting of adminship is almost guaranteed since all the new accounts have a substantial edit history both in article space and participation in Wikispace, with no controversial edits. Once adminship is granted, sell the account name and password on Ebay, a la the online gaming schemes. PROFIT!! A similar scheme requiring less time and investment would be the "farming" of "established sockpuppet" accounts, for sale in bulk . . . say, oh, fake accounts aged over a month with an edit count of 100 or so. Like put a lot of 25 to 50 of them on Ebay for sale to the highest bidder. Sockpuppets with a false history would be much less obvious than your "created yesterday with no edits" normal sockpuppets. Just use them from an open proxy and voila! And I'm sure you can imagine how much havoc could be wrought with the farming and selling of admin-level accounts en masse... Quite a lucrative and devious scheme I dare say.
Note: I did not write this, just stumbled across it. Courtney Simpson 18:33, 2 October 2006 (UTC)
Look, don't you realize that the auction on Ebay wouldn't identify the account by name? Jeez... Courtney Simpson 19:02, 2 October 2006 (UTC)
I am sure it would take someone less time to get made admin then it does for someone to get to 60 in World of Warcraft, 312 hours of commited work. There is also the Rank 14 payers that pay for even more hours of work. Also while they will need to know English, the level of their work really isnt difficult, its a matter of scouring news and filling in information that is missing to take care of mainspace edits. -- NuclearUmpf 19:16, 2 October 2006 (UTC)
Why on earth would someone pay money for an admin account? -- SB_Johnny| talk| books 22:57, 2 October 2006 (UTC)
But isn't this just how adminships on Wikipedia are gotten, by posting senselessly, but not destructively, all over the place to up your edit count, like the Wiki administrator who put up hundreds (or thousands) of expand tags on articles that already have stub tags on them? Oh, and also added expand tags on articles that don't necessarily need expanded, upon the theory that every article on Wikipedia always needs more, more, more? Then deleted, er archived, all references to this on his talk page? So you wind up getting adminstrators that are commercially interested with a scheme like this? Is that worse than getting people who have the time and the will to simply increase the volume of Wikipedia without any sense of what an encyclopedia is--it's not the Internet, more isn't always better on the Internet, either. It seems like the worry is just getting a new variety of folk on a system that already offers plenty of ways to do what they're trying to do. By the way, I always agonize before I save a page that I have everything correct, so I only have to do one Save page. Today, I made a little error that had to be corrected right away, did I get two edit counts for that? As long as it is about quantity not quality there will be tons of ways to get an adminship with little in the way of real contribution. KP Botany 23:13, 2 October 2006 (UTC)
Expanding on the above idea, consider the following scenario (which is harder to track for meatpuppetry that the above one): A millionaire from a foreign country pays 150 people, each with a different IP adresses, to edit articles on Wikipedia a few times every day for three to four months. These users are told not to contact each other and that they should try to mantain different editing styles and attitudes. Then, on every week after the first four months, each of these 150 users are nominated one by one on RfA with most of the other 149 users supporting him. Eventually, this continues onwards until all 150 users are admins or possibly even bureaucrats and stewards. The accounts are then given to the millionaire, who uses it to influence articles related to him, whether negatively or positively. Since he controls over 150 admins (each still with their own IP adress), he can recieve a majority consensus in support from any of the debates he is involved in, with the other admins powerless to stop him... -- TBCΦ talk? 23:44, 2 October 2006 (UTC)
It would never work. unless the average IQ of a wikipedia user starts halving any time soon. The same 150 people voting for each other on nominations is bound to rise suspicion. -- Yaksha 01:37, 7 October 2006 (UTC)
What's the best way to deal with articles that have no prose whatsoever, and only consist of an infobox or a track listing? I run across a surprising number of these. (examples: [15] [16]) I've heard that some people delete them under CSD-A1 (Very short articles providing little or no context), though infoboxes usually make it unambiguous what the article is about, and infoboxes do take some time to fill out. On the other hand, these are extremely unsatisfying articles... a random visitor has to do too much work to figure out what the intro sentence should be, and it's not clear how long the article will be in a prose-free state, and the original author could have spent a very short amount of time to enter an introductory sentence. I usually tag them with {{ context}} to try to urge people to add a single sentence. What do other people do in this situation? -- Interiot 08:39, 5 October 2006 (UTC)
I ask this question because I bumped on the article Piet Keizer, which in its first version was a literal translation from [17]. The text has been rephrased later, but some sentences still are a literal translation and it is very obvious what inspired the article. Taka 18:08, 29 September 2006 (UTC)
(edit conflict) Er, that's not correct. A translation is a "derivative work", and may only be copyrighted with the permission of the original copyright holder. Otherwise, it's still a copyright violation. However, with permission from the copyright holder, presumably a translation could be GFDL and the original version not. -- W.marsh 18:45, 29 September 2006 (UTC)
I'm going to say it because it is true. Wikipedia is crap if you happen to be new like me and here's why:
Mike 14:25, 2 October 2006 (UTC)
Mike 14:28, 2 October 2006 (UTC)
Hi Mike. Unfortunately your first experience of Wikipedia is typical of what happens to newish editors contributing their first article. They are by far likely to run afoul of WP:NPOV, WP:NOR, WP:V and WP:RS until they've spent quite some time here. I disagree with Merope somewhat, what happened to you was not a case of WP:BITE as you weren't targeted in your personal capacity. However the articles that were nominated were done so absolutely correctly. If you spend any amount of time on NP Patrol and saw the sheer amount of dross coming into the 'pedia you'd understand why some editors have a "shoot on sight" attitude. Most of the time, it is the only effective way to remove unencyclopedic content before it can "fall below the radar" of the community. Zunaid 12:07, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
Jaranda blocked me without cause and refuses to discuss it.
All of the blockers are on the extreme left— Preceding unsigned comment added by 205.188.117.10 ( talk • contribs)
Likely an autoblock used by an AOL troll I blocked. Jaranda wat's sup 05:12, 8 October 2006 (UTC)
A major problem with Wikipedia is that we have all sorts of stubs—some almost fancruft—floating around and abandoned. I propose a new guideline encouraging user to combine these stubs into a master article, and the way to do that. Think of it as Sumary Style for a bunch of articles, rather than one. For example, imagine how disorganized we were before a bunch of microarticles were combined into Apple Developer Tools. We should do that for a lot of articles. Instead of having lots of stubs, we should have (for example) provide summaries of the Works of Edgar Allan Poe. Some that are really tiny can be merged right in; otherwise, main article links are fine if it would take more than a paragraph or two. This allows consolidation and makes it easier for people to watch one article than watch a bunch. If they are sorted by year (that's one of the details we'd have to decide on) the reader could see the author's style progress over time, even if you only used a few paragraphs for something like the Works of William Shakespeare. And it doesn't have to be literature, either.-- Here T oHelp 12:22, 8 October 2006 (UTC)
A discussion to fix an issue w/A7 and G11 is ongoing at the speedy deletion subpage. -- badlydrawnjeff talk 13:15, 8 October 2006 (UTC)
Someone has created an account to delete all external links to All Music Guide, Discogs, MusicBrainz, and Last.fm, calling them "massive spam" (diff), hence its name of User:NoMass.
Personally I couldn't care less about MusicBrainz or Last.fm, but AMG and Discogs had always been valuable resources and external links for music articles, providing infos about stuff we don't or can't have (such as complete discographies with each edition and variant).
Are they now forbidden on Wikipedia? Is that a side-effect of the new tougher-on-spam policies and quick deletion of spam pages? 62.147.86.81 22:48, 5 October 2006 (UTC)
Moved to Talk:Charizard. 19:07, 8 October 2006 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Mini Talkpage Template Dev920 ( Tory?) 17:35, 8 October 2006 (UTC)
Please see Wikipedia_talk:Naming_conventions: There is a set of proposed conventions for naming articles on controversial events, such as military conflicts and terrorist incidents. Discussion so far indicates that this proposal would codify what is already current practice. Kla'quot 08:57, 9 October 2006 (UTC)
I'm guessing this is one of those items that comes up repeatedly. I know there's a recommendation of signatures being "one line while editing" (which I would say make 80 characters in HTML), but is there any policy? Been seeing more and more 200+ character sigs and would think a policy would be appropriate. Thanks. *Sparkhead 20:23, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
As a matter of principal, I believe freedom of speech, and length thereof shouldn't be limited. --
|
20:27, 10 October 2006 (UTC)
[[Image:SigCommunist.png|15px]]<span style="background-color:#000000; white-space:nowrap; font-variant:small-caps;">[[User:Tom mayfair|<font color="white">P</font><font color="white">r</font><font color="white">e</font><font color="white">m</font><font color="white">i</font><font color="white">e</font><font color="white">r </font><font color="white"> T</font><font color="white">o</font><font color="white">m </font><font color="white">M</font><font color="white">a</font><font color="white">y</font><font color="white">f</font><font color="white">a</font><font color="white">i</font><font color="white">r</font>]]<sup>[[User_talk:Tom mayfair|<font color="white">T</font><font color="white">a</font><font color="white">l</font><font color="white">k</font>]]</sup>[[Image:RedPhone.jpg|15px]]<small><sub>[[Uncyclopedia:Folding@home|<font color="white">F</font><font color="white">@</font><font color="white">H</font>]]</sub></small></span>[[Image:Sucrose_b.gif|30px]][[Image:MUN.png|15px]]
. I'm starting to think maybe a "rehabilitation" program of unsyclopedia users might be in order, they seem to love exessively long image laden transcluded signatures over there. --
Sherool
(talk) 20:46, 10 October 2006 (UTC)I've had a rant on this exact issue linked in my sig for a while. Night Gyr ( talk/ Oy) 21:51, 10 October 2006 (UTC)
This would help to cut down on image trolling.-- Rouge Rosado Oui? 22:27, 7 October 2006 (UTC)
I have to agree with Heretohelp on this one. Whatever policies we have, malicious editors will be able to get around through Commons or sockpuppetts or meatpuppets. That's not the point here: we get a lot of newbies which either are well-intentioned but are uploading copyrighted material or are ill-intentioned but are, shall we say, casual vandals. In many ways, knowing about Commons shows that you're an experienced editor! Pascal.Tesson 19:58, 8 October 2006 (UTC)
I referenced this thread on Bugzilla: bugzilla:7539. Dragons flight 21:57, 9 October 2006 (UTC)
Why are we honoring Nazi and Al-Qaeda copyrights? Examples:
Is it even legal under U.S. law to honor these? Does the Foundation have an opinion? - CrazyRussian talk/ email 03:16, 9 October 2006 (UTC)
You are invited to join a discussion whether we should expand Notability—companies from Fortune 500 & Forbes 500 to Fortune 1000 & Forbes 2000.
The English Wikproject has 6,818,458 articles today. An English Wikproject Articles progress summary follows:
Date | Milestone | Comment |
---|---|---|
January 2001 | 100 articles | |
April 2001 | 1,000 articles | |
October 2001 | 10,000 articles | |
January 2003 | 100,000 articles | |
February 2004 | 200,000 articles | |
July 2004 | 300,000 articles | 155 days since the 200,000th article. |
Nov 2004 | 400,000 articles | 130 days since the 300,000th article. |
March 2005 | 500,000 articles | 117 days since the 400,000th article. |
June 2005 | 600,000 articles | Approx. 93 days since the 500,000th article. |
August 2005 | 700,000 articles | 68 days since the 600,000th article. |
Nov 2005 | 800,000 articles | 68 days since the 700,000th article. |
4 Jan 2006 | 900,000 articles | 64 days since the 800,000th article. |
1 Mar 2006 | 1,000,000 articles | 58 days since the 900,000th article. |
26 Apr 2006 | 1,100,000 articles | 56 days since the 1,000,000th article. |
19 June 2006 | 1,200,000 articles | 54 days since the 1,100,000th article. |
6 August 2006 | 1,300,000 articles | 48 days since the 1,200,000th article. |
24 September 2006 | 1,400,000 articles | 49 days since the 1,300,000th article. |
The point— the English Wikproject continues to expand. There are a number of main articles that need to be written still (e.g., all Fortune 500 companies do not yet have articles); none-the-less much of the current expansion is coming in the form of specialized articles in relatively narrow fields based on individual contributor’s interests. Wikipedia is an important research tool because it provides depth in areas that traditional encyclopedias don’t; it becomes more important as it expands. The trend to more specialized articles is not only acceptable; it is desirable. May first come to Wikipedia when they note that “Googles” on obscure topics turn up Wikipedia answers. Many stay because there is information in the Wikipedia that can’t be found anywhere else (at least in English). The English Wikproject becomes ever more valuable as a research tool as it goes into ever more specialized topics.
At some point we will fill out all the Fortune 500 and Forbes 500 companies. At that time it makes sense to continue down to the : Fortune 1000 and Forbes 2000 companies. Although I’d like to see creation of a Wikiproject:companies and corporations with a concerted effort to complete the articles on the Fortune 500 and Forbes 500, articles on Wikipedia are normally contributed in piecemeal fashion and someone later comes along to systematize the structure with a Wikiproject. Hence this expansion of criteria can be argued to be just a continuation of the normal process.
Come join the debate & consensus building if you care about the topic—support and opposition are equally welcome, as long as the comment is thoughtful. Skål - Williamborg ( Bill) 04:38, 9 October 2006 (UTC)
Just came across Robert Parkyn, a City of Calgary, Alberta alderman from 1926 to 1944. Someone is putting in the entire historical list of Calgary aldermen. Is this is a good thing or a bad thing? -- John Nagle 05:10, 9 October 2006 (UTC)
This Portal seems to be at the heart of a massive project to build galleries of maps for every nation and continent (separate from the existing geography pages) that's against a basic tenet of wp:not -- wikipedia's not for galleries. There are over 200 articles involved here so I'd like to get more input before I take this to deletion. It seems like all the pages should be transwikied to commons and linked from the appropriate geography articles, so we can have a neat little box that says "wikimedia commons has maps of x" without filling wikipedia with pages that aren't articles. Night Gyr ( talk/ Oy) 06:32, 9 October 2006 (UTC)
If a vandal's real name, address, and phone number are known (such as if they put it on their personal website) can Wikipedia send a cease and decist or a restraining order to stop them from vandalizing? This is not hypothetical. Anomo 12:08, 9 October 2006 (UTC)
Hi. We're having a discussion over at Wikipedia talk:Civility#The use of sarcasm regarding the list of "petty examples" of incivility "that contribute to an uncivil environment". In particular, there's some disagreement over whether or not "sarcasm" is an example of a behavior that contributes to an incivil environment. Since there are two people seeing it one way and two people seeing in a different way, I thought it might help to request broader input. Thanks in advance to anyone willing to contribute their perspective to the conversation. - GTBacchus( talk) 16:10, 9 October 2006 (UTC)
Quick policy question. I notice that Chips Ahoy! was deleted by Improv ( talk · contribs · blocks · protections · deletions · page moves · rights · RfA) under the new G11 WP:CSD. In determining the scope of the new rule, can we differentiate between spamvertisements and legit articles about products that happen to be sold commercially? Improv's action seems to meet the letter of the policy, it's the spirit of it that I'm concerned about. - CHAIRBOY ( ☎) 17:06, 9 October 2006 (UTC)
CHAIRBOY ( ☎) 17:49, 9 October 2006 (UTC)Blatant advertising. Pages which only promote a company, product, group or service and which would need to be fundamentally rewritten in order to become encyclopedic.
What really bothers me here is that I strongly believe that G11 is badly needed and I dismissed as paranoid those who believed that this would not be applied carelessly. It appears however that this is not quite the case so far. Maybe admins should be rebriefed about the intention here. In the Pepperidge Farm article for instance, two thirds of the article are a list of their cookies. That's advertising? No problem, delete that but there's no need to delete the article. Chips Ahoy! says these cookies are yummy? Well delete that but we're talking about a cookie brand that's almost part of North American pop culture. Please admins: don't give G11 a bad name by going on crusade. Actually, I think that we should have a few weeks where admins are strongly discouraged to G11 anything where the tag has not been applied by someone else. Pascal.Tesson 20:06, 9 October 2006 (UTC)
This is in response to some discussion I've been seeing (primarily at WP:RfA, but elsewhere as well.
I think we should standardise what we use to determine as consensus.
To start:
I think the minimum of 5 should be required to prevent WP:BITE, and just any sort of bullying. ("Me and my two friends say what goes around here, in this here article.")
And I think the minimum should deal with issues which currently require the "higher" percents of 75-80.
Yes, I realize that many see voting as evil, but that's not necessarily what I am talking about. Counting heads is not the same as determining consensus.
Interested in hearing pros and cons. - jc37 19:59, 9 October 2006 (UTC)
Perhaps this is a little off-topic, but what I really dislike here is that when things are decided by general consensus, expert opinions -- especially in the sciences -- are given no more weight than anyone else's. You get situations where a majority of rather clueless individuals basically ends up dictating how specialists can organize and write their articles. It's like the arts department always gets a say in how things are done in the chemistry department; not very efficient and rather depressing for the chemistry department, even if the arts department means well. Why can't this situation be improved? Frankly, I believe Wikipedia looses a lot of potential editors this way who might otherwise be writing fantastic articles for us. -- Jwinius 02:15, 10 October 2006 (UTC)
Well, if things like the Taxobox is ignored...what makes you think it'll be less ignored if the article title is changed? For all we know, changing titles of articles to scientific names could make the article in general more ignored. Either way, it's just speculation. The bottom line is, this isn't about biology. Biologists may know their biology, but they don't nessasarily know how to write an encyclopedia. Nor do they nessasarily know how to organise or present information in a wiki environment. Does remaning the article make editors take it more seriously? readers? teachers? are the public actually confused by the use of common names and not scientific ones, would using scientific names actually make it easier for everyone? Although using scientific names would make organization easier for those familiar with taxonomy, but wouldn't it make organization far harder for those who are NOT familiar with taxnomy? (which is the majority of editors here.)
Let's say in a school, the biologists run their department and their expert opinion is respected, but they will probably still have to consult the finance people when it comes to money issues, and listen to the maintainance folk when it comes to their building, because they're not experts in that area. Similarly here, experts may be experts in one area of knowledge, but they are not nessasarily experts in running/organizing/maintaining an encyclopedia, if anything, the long term editors here know more about what makes a wiki work than so called experts.
Giving experts a say when there is a content disagreement may well be a good idea in theory, but there are still major problems with that (who is an expert? how do you prove someone's an expert? All it takes is a few idiots pretending to be experts and messing things up for the community to lose all trust in the claim of expertise); but giving science-experts the say in how to organize and how to write an encyclopedia? Sorry, but i can't agree. All the problems you have outlined are not biology problems, but organization and presentation problems. And i suspect this is often the case when experts (or when people such as you) are advocating for experts to have more say - it's more say in how to run the place. And not so much more say in content. -- `/aksha 23:51, 11 October 2006 (UTC)
...and not one in any language I know. It actually hurts my eyes. Can you please try to spell it correctly? It is a very basic principle in Wikipedia and deserves this tiny bit of respect. Thanks. -- Stephan Schulz 22:44, 9 October 2006 (UTC)
Please - anyone can make a typing error. Let's not make fun of another user.-- Runcorn 19:37, 11 October 2006 (UTC)
I was discussing whether we legally need to give credit to the photographer of a creative commons Attribution-ShareAlike on the article page. I can't imagine we legally need to do so. If so, we need to edit a whole lot of articles to credit photographers. Garion96 (talk) 22:34, 9 October 2006 (UTC)
How do I get a URL added to the automatic block list? -- ArmadilloFromHell 04:37, 10 October 2006 (UTC)
Hi everyone, I would like to know whether there are any guidelines for disambiguation pages about the country names, such as Italy (disambiguation) or Germany (disambiguation). There is a revert war on Russia (disambiguation): one opinionated user attempts to list all Russian states throughout history, such as Kievan Rus or Republic of Novgorod. Such a list would be endless. I don't think anyone would search for "Republic of Novgorod" under "Russia"; there is really no ambiguity here. Furthermore, he adds to the article numerous "see also"s, leading to irrelevant articles such as Rugians. User:Mikkalai tried to talk with him (without avail); I hope that a wider discussion of the issue will be productive. Please share your opinions. -- Ghirla -трёп- 09:12, 10 October 2006 (UTC)
I have looked through Wikipedia’s Help Section but have not found it very useful (I’m sorry) in dealing with this, so I am asking for help here…
I have been frustrated trying to edit what may be a “vanity” post, and one with what I thought is a particular noticeable POV. The article in question is on libertarian author Jim Powell. The original author keeps making and remaking the same changes and undoing other's edits.
He deletes references to Powell’s current publisher. The current publisher is a conservative political press, not an academic one. Since Powell contends he is a historian I think this is relevant information and did my best to add it without any POV.
The original author keeps adding what could be considered “puff words” about all the libraries Powell uses. Anybody can use a library. Does it make the author more believable if he lists the many he visited? Judging from his book’s footnotes he relies on secondary sources and not archives.
The original author keeps re-added phrases about how great Powell’s writing is. Fine, but there is no sourcing and no reference to any possible negative reviews.
FYI: I noticed the IP address that wrote the article and that continues to edit it can be traced to a Travel Agency in new York City. Powell used to write for travel magazine in NYC. Possible sock-puppet??
I started a talk page on the original article but the original author has ignored it.
Hanover81 14:34, 10 October 2006 (UTC)
Are first person accounts appropriate for Wikipedia? I was in a train wreck a number of years ago. When I found an entry for it I posted a first account of my experience which was pretty remarkable (I was shot out the train and landed on the tracks). Another person, a very experienced Wiki contributor, deleted it saying that first person accounts are inappropriate. Is this correct?
Taganwiki 21:31, 10 October 2006 (UTC)
(edit conflict)
Agreed. This would come down to "own research". I've gotten to the point where I've even been deleting perfectly believeable stuff that I myself wrote before, but didn't supply any references for. I've also been telling other people that if they have some interesting experiences to share, just publish it somewhere else first -- your own hope page for all I care -- and then perhaps we'll quote and reference you (alas, most of them suffer from writer's block). In this case you could do it all on your own -- just don't try to plagiarize yourself, as that would set a bad example! :-)) -- Jwinius 22:45, 10 October 2006 (UTC)
Thanks all for the clarification - I am new to this. Actually most of my account was recorded in TV interviews and newspaper articles right after the accident. So I would need to reference those shorter peices rather than the longer and more complete summary that I just wrote. Incidentially some of those articles had errors in them so sometimes the secondary sources are not as reliable as primary.
Taganwiki 23:59, 10 October 2006 (UTC)
A word of caution. Publish it somewhere on the web you can well do, but I doubt very much that it would be considered a reliable source, and any other editor would be justified in removing it. It is preferable to use news articles and the like, as these are mostly considered to be reliable. In response to your last argument, we are after verifiabily, not truth. Zunaid 10:33, 11 October 2006 (UTC)
I see that Ook!_programming_language has been deleted. When I read Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Ook! programming language I see that there was no consensus. Does "no consensus" mean delete an article? -- SGBailey 22:28, 10 October 2006 (UTC)
As AOL uses a system where multiple users have the same IP address, we end up with the rather bothersome situation where people are being locked out of Wikipedia for the actions of other user on their IP. In effect, a thousand people are being punished for the acts of one.
Might I suggest that AOL users be made to create accounts if they wish to edit wiki articles? I know that seems somewhat unfair, but as stated, so many people are using the same address simulataneously that if one user gets punished, the rest get punished unfairly. If AOL users were made to create accounts before they were allowed to edit, then instead of blocking the IP, only the accounts that were causing problems would get blocked. HalfShadow 02:36, 11 October 2006 (UTC)
All editors with an interest in good sourcing are invited to review a proposal to replace Wikipedia:No original research and Wikipedia:Verifiability with one policy: Wikipedia:Attribution. The proposal picks up the key points from NOR and V, and has some additional allowances regarding the types of sources used in pop culture articles, to make things easier for editors working in that area. The proposal cuts out the fluff from NOR and V; and having one policy rather than two should reduce the potential for confusion and inconsistency. SlimVirgin (talk) 10:30, 11 October 2006 (UTC)
What's the policy/procedure regarding the blocking of IPs that are of an institution with multiple computers using the same IP? Take for example 193.171.151.129. Do we keep blocking the school for 24-hour periods and hope one day it'll stop? And what does the "efforts will be made to contact [school] to report network abuse" mean? Who will do this? - newkai t- c 14:31, 11 October 2006 (UTC)
An article I was watching was recently proposed for deletion. I replied about this on the talk page, but was ignored and the article was deleted without any arguments to counter mine. Is this how it's supposed to happen? The article in question was QDB.us. Peaceduck 16:48, 11 October 2006 (UTC)
I had the idea of a policy on Wikipedia, in which if a registered user accumulates a certain number of blocks (100?) of any length and/or form, he/she is permanantly/indefinitely banned from ediitng Wikipedia. The fact is, there are some users that just never learn. I'm not going to point any fingers, but I have seen some users with incredibly long block logs and warnings, but that keep going at it (whatever it may be: vandalism, pushing POV, disrespect for other users, etc). Of course, this scenario is very unlikely and most users do eventualy stop if they have accumulated enough blocks, but in some cases this might sort out some problems. Any comments? -- Nautica Shad e s 19:57, 11 October 2006 (UTC)
I have a question - if an editor is an administrator on another language Wikipedia or sister project, but there is evidence that he/she is breaking WP policies and behaving in a disruptive and boorish fashion on the English Wikipedia, can action be taken against that editor on the project where he/she is an administrator, based on this evidence? Rama's arrow 20:32, 11 October 2006 (UTC)
The nutshell version of WP:AUTO appears to be confusing and too 'agressive'. Comments appreciated at Wikipedia_talk:Autobiography#Confusing_nuthsell.-- Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus | talk 20:35, 11 October 2006 (UTC)
Browsing through random articles, I came across a rather strange dispute: Joko Beck. I've read the debates (here, there, and everywhere), and I was quite suprised by the power that a complaint made directly to "those above" has. Although I understand the reasoning behind the removal of the content, I can't help thinking that if there had been no threat, no-one would have considered the content a problem (especially since it could have been phrased: "Beck claims to have these clients: ..."). This lead me to think that we should have a tag for saying that external complaints or legal threats have played a part in making the article what it is. At least we'd know when the content really is community-based, and when it's been decided by the powers that be. Any ideas? yandman 21:37, 11 October 2006 (UTC)
Exactly: WP:BLP#Using_the_subject_as_a_source. "When information supplied by the subject conflicts with unsourced statements in the article, the unsourced statements should be removed.". The statement "Beck claims to have these clients: .... " is sourced, by his statements, and these are reliable in that context. To sum it up: A statement made by a person is a reliable source concerning that statement. How can that not be so? yandman 11:56, 12 October 2006 (UTC)
Should we semiprotect Wikipedia:User page? It looks like it gets destroyed a few times a day by some new user trying to create their own user page. Fan-1967 20:58, 12 October 2006 (UTC)
I am sick and tired of seeing fanatical POV-pushers taking over wikipedia articles. A detailed explanation of this is at User:Nikodemos/Asymmetric controversy and User:Infinity0/Wiki disclaimer. What I suggest is simple.
*in the article/template namespace and any others prone to dispute, but not talk pages
My first proposal for x would be 10. See, this does not harm normal people in any way, since 10 edits is quite a lot, and there is always a preview button. But, this would really slow down disputes, where two or more people keep editing against each other. -- infinity 0 23:02, 12 October 2006 (UTC)
And I don't mean "If they make x+1 edits they get blocked", I mean "it is technically impossible to make more than x edits to the same article in one day." -- infinity 0 23:07, 12 October 2006 (UTC)
Actually Wikipedia adopted a new guideline last month to deal with disruption. Check out WP:DE. Regards, Durova 19:39, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
This is in response to some discussions I've been seeing (primarily at WP:RfA, but elsewhere as well).
I think we should standardise what we use to determine consensus.
I am breaking the earlier suggestion into two separate groups for discussion. - jc37 00:06, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
(Originally I suggested 5. I would be interested in discussing rationales for quorum numbers.)
I think the minimum of 6 should be required to prevent WP:BITE, and just any sort of bullying. ("Me and my two friends say what goes around here, in this here article.") - jc37 00:06, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
---
I think the minimum should deal with several issues of cases which currently require the "higher" percents of 75-80. - jc37 00:06, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
In almost every case these simple rules are working fairly well. Yes, it does lead to odd compromises or stalls progress but I think that trying to codify the whole thing will make things worse. Pascal.Tesson 21:51, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
There is currently a debate within the Quebec bashing Discussion page dealing with the propriety of using Vigile.net as an intermediate source. [22] Of the 56 unique references currently cited, 21 direct the user to the Vigile.net website. The debate began with my objection. In short, my argument is as follows: 1) Vigile.net appears to be posting newspaper and magazine articles without permission, as such the accuracy of the transcriptions is called into question; 2) Vigile.net is a website with a clear political agenda, meaning the user is being directed not to the source, but to a biased intermediate website. It is my opinion that this runs counter to WP:RS guidelines; in particular that covered by the "Partisan, religious and extremist websites" section. I'd be interested in the views of others on this issue. Victoriagirl 02:19, 14 October 2006 (UTC)
I have made a proposal for introducing a seperate namespace for lists. Please suggest your views. Your response to the proposal is invited on proposal page. Shyam ( T/ C) 19:03, 14 October 2006 (UTC)
What's the policy for signing your prod's? Are you suppose to, or should you just let the history do the talking for you? - Royalguard11( Talk· Desk) 20:43, 14 October 2006 (UTC)
If there is an Wikipedia entry about an entry and there are few outside references in order to explain it, Can one use various in context sections from the site and juxtapose them with contradictory quotes written by the same author in order to give readers a better understanding of this entry.
I ask because a casual visitor to the site may not notice anything but more indepth research into the many articles gives a clearer picture of the biases inherrant in the site.
I want to do this as objectively as possible and this seems to be a way.
Can one also take assertations from the site that are presented as facts and juxtapose them with facts from a objective reliable source. Of course this would be all done with links to the subject matter and references quoted.
I would like to write this but want to do it objectively. As an example one can juxtapose recorded words and actions by a politician that are contradictory to give an accurate portrayal of who they really are. as long as what you write is true.-- Robbow123 00:19, 15 October 2006 (UTC)
I would like to know whether it is appropriate for several wikipedians of the same nationality, involved in a content dispute with wikipedians of another nationality, to use their native tongue for communication on their talk pages. When I requested them to provide a translation, my request was dismissed as "insulting". Is there any policy on this? I recall that in the past, when most people on Romanian and Polish noticeboards spoke to each other in their native languages and ignored requests to translate their communications into English, their conduct was reprimanded as stimulating evolution of national cliques. -- Ghirla -трёп- 13:47, 16 October 2006 (UTC)
I also want to know what meausures I can undertake against somebody who explicitely insulted me of being a conspirator. Let's say that a X user who has no idea about the FA criteria, gets involved in a FA review, gets exposed by me because of his ignorance and then desperately tries to get revenge on me. As a result, he explitely accuses me of being a "conspirator", without any evidence. I really want to know if I can file an official complaint against him for this humiliating and unbacked slanders. I also want to know what punishment this user may face.-- Yannismarou 14:07, 16 October 2006 (UTC)
As for the original comment, I could not initially find a policy or guide on the use of foreign languages on talk pages, certainly if it was used a lot it could be considered anti-social and is likely to reflect badly on the users involved, if users were using non-english to deliberately confuse another editor then this would more serious. Martin 14:25, 16 October 2006 (UTC)
Ghirla's comments are aggressive elsewhere. Yannismarou is an excellent new editor, who has managed in very little time create Wikiproject:History of Greece and three (four?) Featured articles. Accusations for conspiracy, however, are not an excuse for strong language. Indeed, it is considered good 'wikiquette' to write in English. Ghirla, it is considered good 'wikiquette' not to accuse anyone (of conspiracy or whatever) unless there are solid proofs (diffs) to support it. On the other hand, WP cannot and has not forced English in the talk-pages. Furthermore, if someone indeed wants to 'conspire', they can do it via the perfectly the untraceable e-mail feature (in any language they feel like). Please try to solve this between yourselves, and keep WP:AGF as well as WP:AAGF in mind. My talk is welcoming for your further comments (this is not the place). •NikoSilver• 14:46, 16 October 2006 (UTC)
Someone just added a "history" of the city of Scappoose, Oregon on its talk page. I was about to commend the editor for his or her addition and point out that we would need better citation, etc., before the material was added to the main article. Then I read the whole thing and noticed this fine piece of creative writing moved from history to POV to patent nonsense. I am tempted to blank it, but I'd like some opinions first. Thanks! Katr67 16:00, 16 October 2006 (UTC)
If it's a temporary content fork just to work on it a bit, it might be more productive for everyone if it was worked on in userspace, or at least not on the talk page (though a link to it could be left on the talk page so people are aware of it). If it's a permanent content fork (eg. they don't intend to follow our core policies and don't intend to ever integrate it back in), then that's discouraged, and speedy archiving might be appropriate. -- Interiot 16:22, 16 October 2006 (UTC)
It seems to me that in most articles that give information on how to pronounce a particular word, a bizarre, esoteric code is given. What kind of people use such a code, dare I ask? And how high are their ivory towers? And more to the point, what proportion of the English-speaking population would understand such a code? One in a million might be generous.
Example, from Zeitgeist:
Zeitgeist ((audio) (help·info)) is originally a German expression that means "the spirit (Geist) of the time (Zeit)". It denotes the intellectual and cultural climate of an era. The German pronunciation of the word is [ˈtsa͡ɪtga͡ɪst]
ˈtsa͡ɪtga͡ɪst??? Oh, now I understand!
Why not just use a simplier code? Perhaps 'zIt-gIst" -- or just say that it rhymes with, oh, I don't know, "mice fight".
Cheers. Chris 20:33, 16 October 2006 (UTC)
I support using IPA to illustrate pronunciation because ultimately, there are no better options. However, I think we should go for phonemic rather than phonetic transcription. This makes the learning curve much easier for those unfamiliar with IPA, illustrating the pronunciation while allowing for dialectical differences. There's no need to go into absolutely precise detail. For example, a transcription doesn't need to show that initial "t" is generally aspirated in English, or that vowels preceding nasal consonants (like m or n) take on a nasal quality. szyslak ( t, c, e) 21:26, 16 October 2006 (UTC)
I'm terribly sorry if this comes accross as incivil in any way, but the following discourse just made me pull a spit-take (with a partly chewed bagel, nontheless):
Did it ever strike you being just ever so slightly absurd to willfully remain ignorant on a matter when you're attempting to co-author an encyclopedia? We should all be willing to learn new things here. -- tjstrf 22:20, 16 October 2006 (UTC)
I think there should be a waiting period for adding spoilers to an article - maybe like a month after it's release/showing/etc. Pokemon Diamond and Pearl is rife with storyline spoilers. it's impossible to help edit the article without uncovering a spoiler. -- 172.163.213.41 05:24, 17 October 2006 (UTC)
I have been falsely accused of personal attacks and threatened with account blocking by a user named Hkelkar. This user has taken control of the article above and removes any discussion he disagrees with. The lates case, a comment I entered in the Talk:Indian caste system with teh title "Inextricability from Hinduism", which has been removed twice in an arbitrary way. Please be aware that this sort of things are happening in Wikipedida.-- tequendamia 07:44, 17 October 2006 (UTC)
He refuses to even discuss with me, only edit-war and disrupt.Can somebody at least get him to calm down and discuss civilly with other editors? Hkelkar 08:26, 17 October 2006 (UTC)
Wikibooks now has Special:Import enabled for transwikiing from wikipedia. We're not quite ready for the big show (we want our "Transwiki:" pseudonamespace turned into a true namespace first for smooth interwikilinking...material in that namespace will now be permanent redirects so wikipedians can find things they're looking for), but I have begun to transwiki recipes into the "Cookbook:" namespace (keep in mind there are very few wikibooks administrators, so clearing the wikipedia backlogs will take some time).
The most recent discussion about this is here, which was where we voted for it, but transwikis from wikibooks have long been a contentious issue for a lot of the wikibookians, because in the past things tended to just get dropped there willy-nilly (often without pagehistories, etc.), sand more often than not just ended up being deleted.
So we're hoping a few policies can be changed here on wikipedia to take full advantage of our shiny new tool. First, we'd like to call an end to copy-paste transwikis (the current mood is to ban copy-paste in lieu of import on the wikibooks side, so the policy here should probably reflect that). Any wikipedian wishing to have something transwikied to wikibooks can simply make the request at Wikibooks:Requests for Import. I personally will bee keeping an eye on Category:Copy to Wikibooks and Category:Articles containing how-to sections, but most of the other admins aren't particularly interested (with the exception of Uncle_G, who I believe is also an administrator on wikipedia).
Second, I'd like to have a few templates/categories we can use to inform both the authors of the articles and the "WP:NOT" patrollers that the transwiki has taken place, and the article can either be switched to a soft redirect, cleaned up to remove how-to/textbookish material, or just deleted. I had made some templates for this a month or so ago, but a bot came through and cleared them out (I never could figure out why), so I'd prefer to leave this part of the work to some more experienced wikipedians (also, the onus of the actual importing and cleaning up on the wikibooks side will most likely be squarely on my shoulders, so I'd rather just watch the policy than try to take part in it).
Templates of the following ilks would be useful:
I should point out that I'm a wikipedian also, and part of why I'm doing the importing is to help the cleanup process here, as well as preventing mess-making there. I'm also a follower of the ism that wikipedia is not doomed, but in some topic areas, wikipedia is more or less done: the only way to improve a lot of the articles is to actually make textbooks out of them, which definitely goes into realms well beyond the limits set by WP:NOT. Wikibooks can be nearly anything, as long as they're NPOV, instructional, and factual: hopefully wikipedians who've already written all they could on their areas of expertise might want to bring it a step further. (Yes, I am plugging a bit here, but after spending a bunch of time wikifying, there is a certain perverse pleasure in de-wikifying :-).) ---- SB_Johnny| talk| books 11:34, 17 October 2006 (UTC)
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I know this has been discussed before, but I think it's time to bring the issue up again. As many of you know, the GFDL in its current form is not a good fit for Wikipedia. In fact it's a downright terrible license for the goals we have as a project. The only reason it was chosen is because it was the best option at the time (Creative Commons licenses didn't exist at the time). When I brought up this issue a long time ago, I was told that Wikipedia and the GNU Project were in discussions about updating the license. It seems nothing came of those discussions as the GFDL is still the same as it was 4 years ago. Wikipedia is BY FAR the biggest user of the GFDL. Why is it impossible for us to get some minor changes made to the license (changing the DRM and printing restrictions for example)? And if it is that difficult to get changes made through the GNU Project, why can't we just update the license ourselves? To me, the current sitatution seems akin to Intel having to get permission from the descendents of Charles Babbage to make a change to the design of their microprocessors. Why are we still stuck in the licensing dark ages??? Kaldari 22:18, 17 September 2006 (UTC)
I'm having a problem with an editor in the 2006 Thailand coup d'état and Public disapproval and protest of the 2006 Thailand coup d'état. And I'm seeking some advice and clarification about one issue in particular. This editor keeps adding the claim "The urban poor, as well as the rural farmers in the north and Isan still widely respect Thaksin". To support this, he links to this article [1] which basically makes that claim (well not quite but close enough for my purpose). He claims that this statement fulfills our requirements as it is verifiable. However it is my belief that he's wrong. It is impossible for the author to know for sure that the urban poor etc respect Thaksin therefore we can only mention that this source (and possibly other sources) made that claim (e.g. a number of sources have claimed that the...). And I believe this holds even though we don't know of any sources which specifically dispute this claim.
Firstly, is my understanding correct? Secondly, assuming it is, I would like some suggestions as to how to better explain this issue to the editor. Nil Einne 21:00, 27 September 2006 (UTC)
Your understanding seems correct to me and here's the weakness to the other peson's arguement, as I understand policy. A single newspaper article uses a single individual to illustrate a point. The article present the newspaper editor's conclusion, Chalaem's lingering respect for Thaksin -- still widely shared among the urban poor and rural farmers across the country's north and northeast.. That is a valid cite and if there were 1000 such references then lingering respect for Thaksin would be the widely held (because it is widely published) point of view. But only one newspaper article by one editor says that. this link] says that editor doesn't normally write about Thailand. Therefore, because it is a single source, then that information should be presented as coming from a single source, as being a single source. Something like, A Washington Post's writer, Anthony Faiola, said that the urban poor and rural farmers have lingering respect for Thaksin in a Washington Post article.[link to article]. Terryeo 21:24, 27 September 2006 (UTC)
I propose that an addition be made to Wikipedia:Vandalism#Types of vandalism. Specifically to mention the practice of disemvowelling as an act of vandalism. The current policy states as such:
"Changing people's comments Editing signed comments by another user to substantially change their meaning (e.g. turning someone's vote around), except when removing a personal attack (which is somewhat controversial in and of itself). Signifying that a comment is unsigned is an exception. e.g. (unsigned comment from user)"
I propose that the practice of disemvowelling be added to this text, so it would read as such: "Changing people's comments Editing (or disemvowelling) signed comments by another user to substantially change their meaning (e.g. turning someone's vote around), except when removing a personal attack (which is somewhat controversial in and of itself). Signifying that a comment is unsigned is an exception. e.g. (unsigned comment from user)"
I wish to give an example from Calton's talk page:
"If you remove sources from articles it makes it difficult for other editors to check the matters referred to. Please don't do this in order to make a point about Arbitrarion Committee decisions having to be kept to even if you don't like them. David | Talk 15:07, 9 September 2006 (UTC)"
was changed to this:
"f y rmv srcs frm rtcls t mks t dffclt fr thr dtrs t chck th mttrs rfrrd t. Pls dn't d ths n rdr t mk pnt bt rbtrrn Cmmtt dcsns hvng t b kpt t vn f y dn't lk thm. - David | Talk 15:07, 9 September 2006 (UTC)"
Not only is this uncivil, but it is an overly aggressive way to handle any situation resulting from any edit conflict.
Thank you. TruthCrusader 15:45, 26 September 2006 (UTC)
Fiddle Faddle may contain nuts. |
You know, we really need a template for all the stupid vandalism of the freaking Cattle page! Of all the dumb pages to want to vandalism. With there being so much vandalism, I do think it merit's it own template. My ideal template would be PG-13 and probably not good to have but it would get the point across. like ((cowf****r)) Please do not (mess) with the Cattle Page. It is considered vandalism and the Cows do not like it - Tom
Back to the original topic...we need this added to policy, IMHO, because if it is NOT clearly spelt out then certain editors would continue to disemvowell because they will just argue "show me where it is written that I cannot disemvowell". WHich is an argument I see a LOT on Wikipedia when it comes to certain grey areas; "Show me where it is WRITTEN down". So why NOT write it down? TruthCrusader 08:13, 28 September 2006 (UTC)
There is discussion on WT:CSD regarding deletion of blatant advertising or spam that is either (1) of a non-notable product, or (2) in userspace of a user with little or no other contribs. >Radiant< 13:06, 28 September 2006 (UTC)
On first glance 1,3-Butadiene (data page) is a nearly empty article with no introductory text or other context. On closer examination, it's meant to serve as a "subpage" of 1,3-Butadiene, to present infobox information that may be too extensive to display in the article's main infobox. There are also several related infobox "subpages". I was just wondering if there's support for this in any of our style guides? Is this sort of thing a good idea? Might it be better to store subpages that contain no prose whatsever somewhere else (eg. in template space?) so that people don't get confused and mistakenly think that most of the normal style rules apply to them? -- Interiot 20:10, 28 September 2006 (UTC)
To be honest, I dislike such pages as city square, which look like they were imported from Commons. Neither do I approve addition of similar Commons images, sometimes arranged in piles and galleries, without adding anything to the text. The article about Saint Basil's Cathedral had six images of the church. Four of these were arranged into a gallery at the bottom of the page. Today, someone started to expand the gallery with more Commons images of inferior quality. I pointed out to WP:NOT which says: "If you are interested in presenting a picture, please provide an encyclopedic context, or consider adding it to Wikimedia Commons." I was instantly reverted with the edit summary "Restore images: best part of the article". By the way, the article links to the Commons page with images of this cathedral. I would like to know the opinion of others — how many images are appropriate for a short page about a church? Is six enough? Perhaps sixteen? Twenty six? Is there a guideline as to this? -- Ghirla -трёп- 10:36, 26 September 2006 (UTC)
On city square i think the massive wodge of a gallery should go, taking three of the best image into the article proper - the commons link will take the user to a large selection of additional images. Regardless is a square is not notable enough to have it own article then it probably should not be in that massive gallery (if it's kept).
On Saint Basil's Cathedral I do not feel the four additional images in the gallery at the bottom add anything to those already in the article itself. I'd also remove the explicit thumbnail sizing on the images (it's far too big). The article could probably handle three images (at the default thumbnail sizes), but those additional ones aren't great. Thanks/ wangi 12:55, 26 September 2006 (UTC)
Somehow I feel the logo used in the userboxes and the project notices for that project should be changed, the main reason being that it's too similar to Wikimedia's logo and therefore can't be released into the public domain. Compare what happened to the Counter Vandalism Unit's logo some time ago. Peter O. ( Talk) 00:32, 29 September 2006 (UTC)
Wikipe-tan, a character created as a moé anthropomorphism of Wikipedia and used as an unofficial mascot, was promoted to featured image status ( debate). The question is thus whether or not it is acceptable for such an image, which is by its nature a self-reference, to be featured on the main page (currently scheduled for October 2).
Please comment at Wikipedia talk:Picture of the day#Wikipe-tan as POTD?. Dragons flight 01:35, 29 September 2006 (UTC)
The page has been changed in the last couple days to include many new things (take a look at this dif). Some of the new things don't really fit in with "owning" an article though. Minor changes, such as formatting, image size and placement, choice of words, and other mundane edits are argued about on a daily basis by one editor seems to be kind of a false indication. If formatting is done wrong on an article, I fix it, to make the article look better. Image size and placement can't be considered owning the article, especially if the image is too big. Sometimes, there are better words to describe something. The articles are for the readers after all, not for the editors alone. Since WP:OWN is an important policy, I believe we should get at least some community consensus before any changes are made. - Royalguard11( Talk· Desk) 02:07, 24 September 2006 (UTC)
Hi. An editor at Talk:Vlaams Belang (a Dutch language Belgian political party) came up with the interesting remark that a number of quotes, used in the article, are in fact translated from Dutch into English by a Wikipedia editor, which according to him might constitute WP:OR.
Another remark, noted several times before, is that this article (and a number of other articles on Dutch language subjects) used quite a lot of foreign (Dutch and French) language sources (that are not being translated, of course).
I don't seem to find a policy about this. Is there ?
What is the general feeling ? Does using self-translated quotes constitute original research ?
Thanks. -- LucVerhelst 20:32, 28 September 2006 (UTC)
“ | Because this is the English Wikipedia, English-language sources should be given whenever possible, and should always be used in preference to other language sources of equal calibre. However, do give references in other languages where appropriate. If quoting from a different language source, an English translation should be given with the original-language quote beside it. | ” |
But translating a political statement isn't like translating a scientific statement. A quote where someone says they deliberately lost a case for propaganda reasons, for instance, could very well have nuances of wording which make it not mean exactly what it seems to mean. A scientific or historical quote won't.
It's true that summarizing an already English quote raises similar issues yet is accepted. But my guess is that if the quote was originally English, we would have recognized the issues and not summarized it either. When a quote is used to condemn someone by their own words, we quote, we don't summarize.
(I don't know Dutch. If the original is so clear that the translator doesn't need to interpret it, ignore this...) Ken Arromdee 21:24, 28 September 2006 (UTC)
See Wikipedia:Village_pump_(proposals)#Male_Domination.3F.
I think it's getting to the point where perhaps we all need to touch base and work out where the common ground on this project is. Our policy and guideline pages are growing out of control and becoming areas of focus as much as the actual encyclopedia is, and I think maybe it's time to rewrite them and try to keep it simple. It looks like we have gone too far down the road of trying to detail every possible instance of what might be an unreliable source, or what might be original research, and maybe it's time to just let the pages breathe and trust our own common sense. Steve block Talk 12:12, 27 September 2006 (UTC)
The first draft of the new version of the GFDL (which all Wikipedia text content is licensed under) was released yesterday. If you are interested in Wikipedia licensing issues, please visit this page and join the discussion. This is very exciting news for Wikipedia! Kaldari 23:08, 27 September 2006 (UTC)
Here is an interesting except from the GFDL2 draft:
“ | 8b. WIKI RELICENSING If the Work was previously published, with no Cover Texts, no Invariant Sections, and no Acknowledgements or Dedications or Endorsements section, in a system for massive public collaboration under version 1.2 of this License, and if all the material in the Work was either initially developed in that collaboration system or had been imported into it before 1 June 2006, then you may relicense the Work under the GNU Wiki License. |
” |
Kaldari 23:15, 27 September 2006 (UTC)
It's also important that Wikipedians take a look at section 6a:
“ | 6a. EXCERPTS You may publish a work, a Modified Version, or a collection, of up to 20,000 characters of text (excluding formatting mark-up) in electronic form, or up to 12 normal printed pages, or up to a minute of audio or video, as an Excerpt. An Excerpt follows the applicable rules of this license, except that the following required materials--the copy of this license, title page materials, historical copyright notices, warranty disclaimers, and any required sections--may be replaced by one or more publicly accessible URLs referring to the same materials. |
” |
This section was ostensibly added to placate Wikipedia so that individual articles could be excerpted from Wikipedia without having to include pages of licensing material. The problem is that "20,000 characters" is tiny. An average Featured Article weighs in at about 50,000 characters, and longer articles often exceed 100,000 characters (e.g. Vietnam War: 142,958 chars; Paleoconservatism: 190,236 chars). Also 20,000 characters in the Chinese Wikipedia counts for a lot more information than 20,000 characters in the English Wikipedia. We should lobby to have this limit changed from "20,000 characters" to "20,000 words". Kaldari 00:27, 28 September 2006 (UTC)
Does anyone know where Danny Wood went to law school? What bar memberships he possesses? -- GreenCommander81 03:09, 29 September 2006 (UTC)
Yeah whatever, brah... GreenCommander81 03:30, 29 September 2006 (UTC)
Danny is most certainly not a lawyer. I think Angela is right - GreenCommander81 is probably confusing him with Brad, who is a lawyer and is Wikimedia's interim executive director. Raul654 12:57, 29 September 2006 (UTC)
Well the point i'm trying to make is why does everyone think, not only on Wikipedia but also on Slashdot and other forums, that people trolling are bored young while males? Haven't you noticed that the average troll is quite articulate and intelligent? I posit to you, kind sir, that many of those you deride as "trolls" are indeed college graduates, and even some professionals. I know of a troll that operated on this very medium last year to be a retired County Court judge in Florida. Just a thought my man... let's tee it up! -- GreenCommander81 03:58, 29 September 2006 (UTC)!
Asking provacative and pointless questions [2] [3] [4] [5] in as public of a venue as you can get [6], and then walking away can certainly count as trolling. -- Interiot 14:03, 29 September 2006 (UTC)
We appear to have a few categories that are collections of articles that have no claim to notability (e.g. a brand of detergent). I won't claim that *everything* in these categories needs to go away, but I don't think 90% would be too bold. For starters, take a look at Category:Brand_name_products_stubs. I'm not sure if the best means to this end would be to simply go ahead and exercise judgement in deleting things, individually listing the hundreds of articles on AfD (gah, hopefully not), or something else. Thoughts? -- Improv 05:04, 15 September 2006 (UTC)
Considering that several people might want to keep these things in some form, a less drastic approach might be to merge the products (short articles anyway) with the company which makes them. After all, if somebody is interested in a company, it is not far-fetched that they'll seek info on their products, but very short stubs on them looks unprofessional. If the article is too long a "list of products by..." might be useful for those who are interested. For the record, I love cruft just as much as Tom Lehrer claimed to love smut in his song. Sjakkalle (Check!) 08:15, 15 September 2006 (UTC)
Widely distributed products deserve articles, as do those that are significant within a single country. Remember that we must work to counter systematic bias, and you may not be aware of foriegn products. That said, a stub cull is probably needed, removing those stubs without enough details to allow it to be properly expanded (such as Duotang) and keeping those giving enough information to allow a full article to be built ( EverGirl, for example). I am personally in favour of lists in the place of stubs, and so merging should be considered. Mass listings on AfD are generally discouraged, and result in horrible messes that often end up overturned. Prodding those stubs without enough contextual information would be wise, even better would be a CSD catagory for "stub without enough information to allow an article to be built". For now I would advise that you prod those stubs without enough information to build an article from. LinaMishima 15:41, 15 September 2006 (UTC)
I've found myself thinking that we need to have a discussion, is notability something wikipedia needs? Please note that we are not asking how to determine notability or whether or not certian criteria regarding notability is correct, just if the concept is needed on wikipedia. Does notability stand on its own two feet? Notability has been a proposed policy for a while, yet we have never really discussed it. ALKIVAR ™ 05:36, 30 September 2006 (UTC)
I'm concerned about the misunderstandings and potentials for abuse arising from this template and its series Template:Test3a etc. The text of these warning templates implies that "removing content" is automatically "considered vandalism". This is in contradiction to Wikipedia:Vandalism#What vandalism is not, and it has given rise to a widespread myth about a non-existant "don't-remove-content" policy. Please comment on Template talk:Test2a. Fut.Perf. ☼ 07:06, 30 September 2006 (UTC)
So I'm planning to start up a small, focused public wiki (non-commercial) that I anticipate will have at least a little bit of overlap with Wikipedia.
As a part of the process of bootstrapping and seeding it with starter articles, I was thinking of grabbing some relevant content from Wikipedia and adapting it for my needs. I assume, for starters, that doing so is in keeping with the GFDL, provided it's republished under GFDL.
Likewise, my hope would be that we would eventually develop content that might be appropriate for a general interest encyclopedia, which we could then port to Wikipedia (pruning it down to general interest length). Again, I assume this is not an issue if ours is published under the GFDL.
But let's say I don't wish to encumber future iterations (print edition?) with the unweildy GFDL manifesto and opt for something like a CC share-alike license...
I take it that the first half of the above (copping Wikipedia content) would be right out—that GFDL content simply can't be republished under CC-by-sa. (Or is there some viable work-around?)
But what about republishing CC-by-sa content to Wikipedia? CC share alike says "you may distribute the resulting work only under a license identical to this one." Does Wikipedia's GFDL qualify as "identical" in this respect?
75.21.89.221 18:55, 30 September 2006 (UTC)
Deco writes: "Any pair of copyleft licenses are fundamentally incompatible."
Wjhonson writes: "In this case *wholely derivative* being perhaps redundant is significant... Derivative in this case, would mean, 'consisting of material entirely retrieved from another work'."
Carnildo: "For articles with no anon contributers and only a few registered authors, you can request that the author release their contributions under another license."
75.22.206.71 21:25, 30 September 2006 (UTC)
I would add ("I" being both 75.21.89.221 and 75.22.206.71 from above) that the share-alike portion of
this CC-by-sa draft reads, "you may distribute the resulting work only under this license" where the final version says, "... a license identical to this one." This change at least suggests to me that CC might not view their license as necessarily "fundamentally incompatible" with other potential copyleft licenses.
So I'll ask again: can CC-by-sa content be republished under GFDL? Both are considered share-alike licenses in some respect. Where does "identity" between licenses begin and end?
Where my law dogs at?
64.109.248.198 00:09, 1 October 2006 (UTC)
I'm not 100% sure I'm posting in the correct spot but I would like to suugest a new wikipedia policy. Namely that, " Exonyms should only be used as a last resort." I came to this conclusion by recently stumbling onto the debate at the Meissen page, which concerns the correct spelling of the town (ss vs ß). It seems to me, regardless of the original title of the created article, if the article deals with a proper name then the native spelling should be used whenever possible, espcially if it won't cause undo confusion among English speakers. Naufana: Talk 03:13, 21 September 2006 (UTC)
Sorry, this is the English Wikipedia. It is our policy to use the most commonly known name in the English language. Would you have our Germany article at Deutschland? User:Zoe| (talk) 03:14, 21 September 2006 (UTC)
What Zoe says! What good could come out of using Meißen or Deutschland or Wien? Just good ol' confusion for the users. Most of the geography pages state the local name in the first line or two of the text anyways and the native name is often made a redirect. This is really a non-issue. Pascal.Tesson 03:21, 21 September 2006 (UTC)
I see country names can be English, but city names should be as close as possible to the local language of the city. English might have "English" versions of some cities, but doesnt have English versions of all cities, and so usually has to use the local names. Having to switch back and forth between sometimes using an English cognate and sometimes not creates even more confusion. Consistency is more important. For example, all names for German cities, towns, villages, hamlets, lakes, rivers, brooks, streams, meadows, regions, mountains, hills, etc., should be according to their German names. Thus the article can have the German city name, Wien. Notable English cognates such as Vienna can redirect to Wien. The only exception is, the English alphabet must be used for English articles. For German, this isnt a problem, thus Meissen (not Meißen). The proper spelling in the local alphabet can be mentioned in the article. -- Haldrik 03:48, 21 September 2006 (UTC)
"But we don't actually care what name he prefers to use." But the fact is, the article is under the self-designated name. "It was indeed formerly known in english as Peking but the standard has been switched to Beijing." Chinese isnt the only language whose naming convention standard is switching to the local language. -- Haldrik 05:37, 21 September 2006 (UTC)
And - how do I put a ß into a word when I'm searching for it? And what about Αθήνα? I think it's Athens & Meissen! Saltmarsh 05:57, 21 September 2006 (UTC)
"How do I put a ß into a word when I'm searching for it?" One doesnt. The standard equivalent is used: a ss. The official equivalent for Αθήνα, according to the Greek government, is Athina. -- Haldrik 06:06, 21 September 2006 (UTC)
But now you are trying to impose your righteous point of view on users. Wikipedia is not a place to try and force every english speaker to use Wien instead of Vienna. Whether you like it or not, Vienna has been the standard name used in english for centuries. In French that would be Vienne, in Spanish Viena and so on. And again, you seem to be missing that point, the native name is always given in the first line of the article. What point would there be to categories if they were filled with 北京. Pascal.Tesson 06:30, 21 September 2006 (UTC)
A better example is the Italian city Torino. The actual local name in Italian is Torino. The English cognate is Turin as in the "Shroud of Turin" or in the "Turin Canon" ("Turin Papyrus of Kings"). The article for this city is still "Turin". However even as we speak the official English name for this city has switched over to the local name Torino since its official use for the Olympics. (Not Turin). For example: NBC Olympic coverage. This switch to the local name as the standard is inevitable. -- Haldrik 06:55, 21 September 2006 (UTC)
Categories don't contain redirects. Also, Torino is indeed an exception where Torino is starting to become standard. But if you want to go the Olympics route, it was the Athens Olympic games, not the Athina olympic games on NBC. Pascal.Tesson 07:04, 21 September 2006 (UTC)
If the local name is always the standard, then there is never a surprise. If the standard is sometimes an archaic English cognate or sometimes a contemporary journalistic local name, then there will always be surprises. -- Haldrik 07:07, 21 September 2006 (UTC)
"Whose POV do we endorse"? POV is a serious problem. Using the defacto local name helps reduce this problem. (It is Iran, not Persia, whether we like it or not, and until it's changed.) Even when the local name is still in question, it's irrelevant to the policy of using the local name. Is it "Israel" or is it "Palestine"? It's frustrating to write articles on this because the usages of these placenames are complex and still fluid. Nevertheless, whichever is prefered, the policy would have "Yisrael" and "Falastina" (assuming the local names would be used for nation states too). Haldrik 07:46, 21 September 2006 (UTC)
"It's name in English is Vienna, not Wien." Well for example, say your standing in the German city Wien/Vienna, and (hypothetically) you are standing on the corner of "Wien Street" and "Meunchen Road". Do you actually call these roads by their names "Wien Street" and "Meunchen Road", or do you switch over to the archaic English cognate and call them "Vienna Street" and "Munich Road"? These kinds of complications are extremely confusing, when you actually have to refer to these names in real life. Simply using the local name as the standard solves all of these kinds of problems. -- Haldrik 08:08, 21 September 2006 (UTC)
Go to the English Google Maps website and type in the "Vienna" search. See what happens!!! -- Haldrik 08:26, 21 September 2006 (UTC)
Haldrik, did you ever reply to the issue of things like Chinese cities? Should Beijing be listed under its name using the Chinese alphabet? Or should it, instead, be listed under the standard english name of Beijing?
Unless you're prepared to say that an english encyclopedia should list it as 北京, you really don't have a leg to stand on. So, which is it? Should Beijing be listed as 北京, or should Wien be listed as Vienna?
Bladestorm 09:33, 21 September 2006 (UTC)
A counterproposal: English Wikipedia should use non-ASCII titles for articles only as a last resort. Every foreign name can be transliterated unambiguously. Using non-ASCII characters creates only problems to Unicode-disabled people, and I see no real advantage of using them - local name is always displayed in the first paragraph. Grue 11:15, 21 September 2006 (UTC)
Can we all agree that this is a rejected proposal? -- tjstrf 15:34, 21 September 2006 (UTC)
Maybe I wasn't clear enough, the last line i wrote was "espcially if it won't cause undo confusion among English speakers." I think it's obvious that established names should probably be left as the exonym (exonym as a last resort was in the title) but for lesser known places the original name should be used. As for being unable to type an "ß," well redirects can bring you from "meissen" to "meißen" and the "ß" is located in the characters list below (second character in the second line) if it is needed in editing. Thanks Naufana: Talk 16:38, 21 September 2006 (UTC)
Check out this diff. I put it in, two days later it got removed.
Cons to allowing subnational entities in sister cities: many.
Pros to allowing subnational entities in sister cities: nobody knows where "Faribault" is (it's in Minnesota).
Discuss! Zweifel 10:46, 1 October 2006 (UTC)
Recently, above, the idea was raised of using advertisements on Wikipedia to raise funds for charity. I don't think this is a good idea, primarily because any sort of commercial advertisement gives the appearance of bias - that these companies could control content by threatening to withdraw advertising funds. But here's a rather different idea.
In Seattle there is a public radio station that plays dance music run by a high school called C89.5. They have a large listenership, but have no advertisements at all; instead, they have "public service announcements", which briefly describe volunteer opportunities in the community, environmental issues, and so on. I wonder if Wikipedia contributors would be willing to tolerate unpaid "public service" advertisements for charitable organizations such as the Red Cross, especially during times of crisis such as natural disasters when they solicit donations. The organization would supply no money for the service, but it would still have a positive impact on the world community. Just a thought? Deco 03:28, 14 September 2006 (UTC)
Several editors have said that they will leave if Wikipedia goes commercial. They see no reason why they should give their free labor to a commercial enterprise. User:Zoe| (talk) 01:03, 16 September 2006 (UTC)
I'm forever frustrated by not learning from any reference work other than a dictionary how the headword is pronounced. I often consult encyclopedic - or reference - dictionaries, which do give a pronunciation guide (because they are chiefly dictionaries and follow the dictionary format). Would it not be an idea for Wikipedia to be (if, indeed, this is the case) the first to do so? Those people who have contributed articles (and I realise some will have contributed a lot) could go back and add a small edit, and, over a couple of years or so, articles would have a pronunciation guide for their headwords.
Andy Armitage
Is there any policy for or against hiding information in navigation boxes? For example the nav-boxes used on United States. → A z a Toth 15:54, 1 October 2006 (UTC)
The recent (and I believe worthwhile but that's beyond the point) proposal to replace the old notability essay with a guideline page reflecting the actual use of notability in the deletion process has led to a lame revert war among experienced editors and admins. The edit warring concerns whether or not the proposal is a proposal or a guideline. One can see that the talk page has become a nasty screaming match where people have pretty much stopped to listen to one another. I think this urgently requires the intervention of cooler heads. Pascal.Tesson 21:36, 1 October 2006 (UTC)
Wikipedia's very own dreaded "n-word" is being discussed over at the proposed rejected disputed
Wikipedia:Non-notability. I've just set up a sort of straw-poll thingy at
Wikipedia talk:Non-notability#Information-gathering straw-poll, and I invite people who are interested in this issue to contribute their opinions so we may gauge how the community of Wikipedians feels about notability as an inclusion criterion.
Have a great day, and remember, voting is evil! :) - GTBacchus( talk) 22:17, 1 October 2006 (UTC)
I now have user accounts on three Wikipedia projects: en, fr and commons. I don't visit each of them on a daily basis, so would it be acceptable to redirect the other two to my talk page on en? My concern is that users would then be unable to sign their names appropiately without explicitly typing in their signature. Is there a better solution to this? (Please reply on my talk page.) -- INTRIGUEBLUE ( talk| contribs) 07:40, 2 October 2006 (UTC)
I can't find a page explainig if it's a policy about moving pages i.e. from wikipedia to wiktionary. We just added on It.wiki and I would to compare it between the mayors project. Bye The Doc post... 13:45, 2 October 2006 (UTC)
Moved to WP:ANI, as there doesn't appear to be any actual policy question or discussion taking place. Ξxtreme Unction| yakkity yak 20:31, 2 October 2006 (UTC)
What's the policy on en.wikipedia regarding the histories of merged pages? Are the histories merged into the destination, or do they just go "poof"?
I'm actually asking this as a wikibooks admin... I discovered that this could indeed be done several weeks ago, but I'm not sure whether it's worth the bother and/or potential upset if an editor comes across the page during the process of merging (it involves merging the stuff into the destination, then deleting the article, then moving the merged article to the space, then restoring all versions, and finally updating to the most recent version). Is it done here? -- SB_Johnny| talk| books 15:41, 2 October 2006 (UTC)
My watchlist is mostly fruits and vegetables (I'm a farmer and these are the things I'm interested in), and many of these seem to have rapidly growing sections on "trivia" or "this fruit in popular culture".
I hate to be the stick-in-the-mud complaining about how fun (and often silly) trivia isn't really encyclopedic, but fun (and often silly) trivia really just isn't encyclopedic. (For the latest example, see radish). -- SB_Johnny| talk| books 23:12, 25 September 2006 (UTC)
As a Good Article reviewer, a designated Trivia section or bullet point "In popular culture" list is generally frowned upon. Ideally anything that is relevant or encyclopedic about the topic should find its way into the main sections of the article. However, I have seen well written "In popular culture" sections that are presented in a prose format instead of the bullet point list. Agne 00:04, 26 September 2006 (UTC)
See: Wikipedia:Navigational boxes → A z a Toth 12:46, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
I'd like to ask any wikipedians who are interested in the transwikiing of "how-to" type articles and/or wikipedians who are hawkish about the GFDL to please express your opinion about enabling import from wikipedia to wikibooks.
For those unfamiliar with the import tool, this allows import of wikipedia articles to wikibooks with the page histories, as opposed to the current copy-paste method which either copies and pastes the material (e.g. b:talk:Transwiki:Dishwasher Repair) or just leaves a link to the original page history (e.g. b:talk:A Wikimanual of Gardening/Rosa multiflora).
There hasn't been much support voiced on wikibooks because (a) most wikibookians aren't particularly interested in policy, and (b) most wikibookians aren't too thrilled about having things transwikied (and then summarily abandoned as stubs) from wikipedia (though I' plan to do a bit of userpage spamming there over the next few days to get support... the only other person who voiced support so far only did so to support me (personally), and plenty of others will vote for that reason since I'm the only admin who gives much of a hoot about our how-to books). (← please don't read any bitterness into this, I really like the "bedroom community" quality of wikibooks (part of why I'm much more at home there than here), it's just that the foundation asked me to rally support, and I'll get more votes quicker asking the wikipedians than the wikibookians. This affects us1 (the "us" that includes me as a wikipedian) probably more than it does us2 (the "us" that includes me as a wikibookian... I lead a confused double-life as far as wikizenship is concerned).
Enabling import on wikibooks would achieve 2 important goals:
Just to clarify why I'm the one making the request here:
Just a note towards a further discussion (assuming the tools are enabled): the "main actors" of the wikibooks community would be a lot more comfortable about hosting transwikis from wikipedia if we1 made it a policy that all transwikis be done this way, since this would ensure that an admin (who at least in theory is familiar with stub-tagging and the WB categories) will make sure it goes where it should, rather than just sitting there. -- SB_Johnny| talk| books 16:14, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
I have to say that something occurred to me lately. Last year, it was standard policy here that only vandals could be unilaterally indefblocked, while those engaged in "trolling" sans-vandalism could only be indefblocked by Jimbo or the ArbCom. see Wikipedia_talk:Dealing_with_disruptive_or_antisocial_editors (a debate from 2004) In 2005 and before, there existed much long-term obvious trolling, and many of those accounts became somewhat notorious, as ArbCom could literally take months to ban even an obvious troll (see User:Lir, User:Rainbowwarrior1977, User:CheeseDreams, and many other "old school" trolls). In some cases, the arbcom would only warn an obvious troll, like that "Anthony DiPierillo" guy or whatever his name was.
Now, however, many attempts at trolling are blocked in the bud by admins before the troll accounts have time to establish a trolling reputation and nobody complains. I remember people would raise holy hell about "process" and "only ArbCom can do that" when a well-meaning admin would unilaterally ban an obvious troll as late as the fall of 2005 (like User:Wiki_brah). In fact, the only "notorious" troll in 2006 that seemed to defy being quickly banned outright was User:Mistress Selina Kyle, who indeed ended up being banned without Arbcom sanction in the end. So what caused this change? Was there an official policy shift? Pardon me, I've only been observing Wikipedia infrequently this year (new job, etc). Thanks in advance, -- Yolanda82 23:05, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
While reading Bankruptcy it occured to me that many wiki articles offer information that could be misconstrued as Legal or Medical advice. It seems to me that it would be a VERY good idea to include a template for a header saying something along the lines of "This article contains information on a Legal/Medical topic. This article is informational only, and under no circumstances should serve as a replacement for professional advice." And then have a little picture of a Caduceus or Lady Justice. That or something like the spoiler warning, except we'll call it a liability warning. Does this seem important to anyone else? -- Niro5 17:13, 4 October 2006 (UTC)
Understandable, but I was unable to find these disclaimers until they were pointed out to me just now. I have used Wikipedia before, and I couldn't find them; what about new users? I understand that the lack of a disclaimer where there are disclaimers might lead to trouble, but perhaps the blanket disclaimer should be easier to find.-- Niro5 18:05, 4 October 2006 (UTC)
A very rough idea, born of the discussion on Wikipedia:Expert Retention.
It's Wikipedia:User versions, for an idea on a way to deal with edit creep, and better enable expert editors to monitor content in their subject area. Among other things. It's an extension/generalization to the "stable versions" system. And it's completely democratic, and in the wiki spirit. I'm mentioning it on both VP:POL and VP:TECH as it has implications for both.
It is very rough at this point, so please don't consider it a proposed policy, yet.
-- EngineerScotty 19:55, 4 October 2006 (UTC)
Seriously, all you folks who spend your days hunting them down and eliminating them.... where will new articles come from? Gzuckier 16:35, 4 October 2006 (UTC)
Aroma amore was tagged for AFD but not completed. Do I complete it or do I just remove the tag? It doesn't document why it was nominated, which makes completion of the nomination difficult. RJFJR 21:01, 5 October 2006 (UTC)
There is a group of wikipedians making edits whose meaning escapes me. For instance, User:Edton routinely makes edits like this, this, or this. When I ask him to explain his grievances, he responds in a defiant tone. Is there any policy behind these edits? How should we distinguish helpful edits from meaningless? -- Ghirla -трёп- 11:02, 5 October 2006 (UTC)
How about this guy: http://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Special:Contributions&target=207.74.23.67
After lots of warnings, and one block, his new, preferred form of vandalism appears to be to vandalise a page, and then undo the vandalism two minutes later. I guess it saves the rest of us the bother, but it's not exactly helpful. Someone may well have been viewing the page at that point. It seems to be behaviour deliberately designed to vandalise without being blocked.
Merlinme 14:59, 5 October 2006 (UTC)
Are we looking at the same user? The four most recent 'contributions' of 207.74.23.67: 1) change the Italian definition of Duce to be 'woman', 2) change it back to 'leader' literally one minute later. 3) Add the name 'Doug Beyer' to the Seven Deadly Sins section on Sloth. 4) Remove it one minute later.
Merlinme 15:13, 5 October 2006 (UTC)
Fair enough, I guess. And going back down the contributions, there are a few useful edits. How do you know it's a school IP?
Merlinme 15:51, 5 October 2006 (UTC)
So much for the IPs. Back to the first chap: he now promises to double or treble his efforts. Clearly a man (or woman) with a mission! -- Hoary 15:57, 5 October 2006 (UTC)
Wikipedia prides itself on being a collaborative venture and often states that anyone can contribute. This does not take into account the proprietary attitude which some editors display to what they regard as their articles. This can lead to the alienation of potentially useful new editors, who often see their work deleted and labelled irrelevant or inappropriate. One way possibly of tackling the problem of "ownership" might be to limit the number of edits which any editor may perform per day on any given page. It would ensure that most editors are careful about only hitting "save" when they are certain that they have finished editing a particular article - the history logs of articles are littered with records of editing that are trivial or malicious. It would also take some of the traffic pressure off Wikipedia servers. The number of edits per day per article could also work on a sliding scale where edit allocations are made according to the editor's history (good or bad) and according to their Wikipedia function. Details would have to be worked out by better minds than mine, but I do think the idea could be made to work well, with very few negative consequences. Have an excellent day.... Paul venter 13:25, 5 October 2006 (UTC)
The worst thing about a rule like this is that it might force you to leave an article vandalised because you are out of reverts, or if you screw something up, you may be unable to fix it. And, of course, as has been said already, it will also increase the likelihood of edit conflicts, if you are copy-editing an article. Article ownership, as described here, is already limited by the 3-revert rule, so any change would restrict editors to 2 or fewer edits per page per day. That is unworkable, and totally disproportionate to the problem. Guettarda 17:04, 5 October 2006 (UTC)
There is currently active discussions being held on Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/TawkerbotTorA and Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/TawkerbotTorA related to creating an automated account to be given sysop rights. Currently there are no such accounts. To prevent a ForestFire please comment on the aforementioned pages if interested. Thank you, — xaosflux Talk 05:08, 6 October 2006 (UTC)
I have a modest proposal at User:AxelBoldt/Real name proposal, restricting editing of encyclopedia articles to people who are willing to provide their verifiable real name. Cheers, AxelBoldt 06:23, 5 September 2006 (UTC)
One of the strongest arguments you will have is the idea that the information is made publically accessible. Given this is generally discouraged online, and it would place serious freedom of speech problems on editors within certain reigemes, this is not only understandable but an entirely valid point. A better idea is that of privately confirmed existance, either by peers or via the wikimedia foundation. Only the peers or the foundation would know this information, and would be bound to keep it private. Much of what would be useful to establish is a level of known expert authority for use in such things as peer review. LinaMishima 12:24, 5 September 2006 (UTC)
I'm worried about NPOV disputes and intimidation. ColourBurst 14:50, 5 September 2006 (UTC)
Only users who are signed-in ... may edit the encyclopedia. This is one of the most common perennial proposals, and it's really really unlikely to ever happen. -- Interiot 15:23, 5 September 2006 (UTC)
Would those of you commenting in this section about "Do not force people to show their real names" pleae repeat what you are saying a little lower on the page, in the section on Tor and China? -- Keybounce 20:58, 19 September 2006 (UTC)
Oh, come now, the 15 or so of us that would be left after this passed could have a grand old time. Dragons flight 05:04, 22 September 2006 (UTC)
I don't think that this is a truly workable proposal. Firstly, as has been pointed out, it is to a certain extent a rehash of 'only logged-in users should edit', which is a bad idea for a variety of reasons. Secondly, it may expose our contributors to an inappropriate level of personal scrutiny. I edit Wikipedia and handle OTRS under my real name, and was recently personally threatened by a correspondent because we wouldn't delete a notable article (amongst other things, he tried to have my research funding suspended). This isn't a risk that every Wikipedian should be forced to take. --ⁿɡ͡b Nick Boalch\ talk 08:02, 25 September 2006 (UTC)
If this were enforced, I would stop editing, and I am sure a large number of other editors also do so. It is completly unworkable, and WP:CREEP. --GW_Simulations User Page | Talk 12:30, 1 October 2006 (UTC)
Yes, it would be unworkable. Drjem3 21:56, 1 October 2006 (UTC)
Strongly oppose - I would leave wikipedia rather than reveal my real name. -- Charlesknight 22:00, 1 October 2006 (UTC)
Strongly Oppose:
Fiddle Faddle 22:16, 1 October 2006 (UTC)
I strongly oppose as well. I can articulate detailed reasoning if desired, but I think it's already snowball-level clear that consensus is against this. Newyorkbrad 22:29, 1 October 2006 (UTC)
The suggestion is really only interesting in that it is founded on such a profound misunderstanding of how both the Internet and the Wiki function. Banno 00:18, 2 October 2006 (UTC)
Accountability is one of the fundamental flaws frequently pointed out about Wikipedia. But I don't think that this proposal solves it. We already have a problem verifying the truthiness of real names. -- Malber ( talk • contribs) 18:35, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
Sounds like a good idea to me. At least, to become a regular contributor and discuss policy issues, deletion, etc. you should be required to provide your real name to the foundation. Tizio, Caio, Sempronio 16:16, 6 October 2006 (UTC)
Admittedly this borrows a bit from the farming and selling of accounts for use in online gaming such as "Worlds of Warcraft" but I must admit that my idea is rather crafty: Employ several impoverished people (better yet children or students) at a pittance to register new accounts on Wikipedia. Have them make simple yet helpful edits to articles daily over four to six months. Start having them post simple votes on AfD and other forums to improve their visibiliy in the Wikipedia community. Once an account's edit count is 1500+, they will nominate themselves for adminship, and once a few are made admins, the new "farmed" admin accounts can nominate other prospective accounts for admin. Granting of adminship is almost guaranteed since all the new accounts have a substantial edit history both in article space and participation in Wikispace, with no controversial edits. Once adminship is granted, sell the account name and password on Ebay, a la the online gaming schemes. PROFIT!! A similar scheme requiring less time and investment would be the "farming" of "established sockpuppet" accounts, for sale in bulk . . . say, oh, fake accounts aged over a month with an edit count of 100 or so. Like put a lot of 25 to 50 of them on Ebay for sale to the highest bidder. Sockpuppets with a false history would be much less obvious than your "created yesterday with no edits" normal sockpuppets. Just use them from an open proxy and voila! And I'm sure you can imagine how much havoc could be wrought with the farming and selling of admin-level accounts en masse... Quite a lucrative and devious scheme I dare say.
Note: I did not write this, just stumbled across it. Courtney Simpson 18:33, 2 October 2006 (UTC)
Look, don't you realize that the auction on Ebay wouldn't identify the account by name? Jeez... Courtney Simpson 19:02, 2 October 2006 (UTC)
I am sure it would take someone less time to get made admin then it does for someone to get to 60 in World of Warcraft, 312 hours of commited work. There is also the Rank 14 payers that pay for even more hours of work. Also while they will need to know English, the level of their work really isnt difficult, its a matter of scouring news and filling in information that is missing to take care of mainspace edits. -- NuclearUmpf 19:16, 2 October 2006 (UTC)
Why on earth would someone pay money for an admin account? -- SB_Johnny| talk| books 22:57, 2 October 2006 (UTC)
But isn't this just how adminships on Wikipedia are gotten, by posting senselessly, but not destructively, all over the place to up your edit count, like the Wiki administrator who put up hundreds (or thousands) of expand tags on articles that already have stub tags on them? Oh, and also added expand tags on articles that don't necessarily need expanded, upon the theory that every article on Wikipedia always needs more, more, more? Then deleted, er archived, all references to this on his talk page? So you wind up getting adminstrators that are commercially interested with a scheme like this? Is that worse than getting people who have the time and the will to simply increase the volume of Wikipedia without any sense of what an encyclopedia is--it's not the Internet, more isn't always better on the Internet, either. It seems like the worry is just getting a new variety of folk on a system that already offers plenty of ways to do what they're trying to do. By the way, I always agonize before I save a page that I have everything correct, so I only have to do one Save page. Today, I made a little error that had to be corrected right away, did I get two edit counts for that? As long as it is about quantity not quality there will be tons of ways to get an adminship with little in the way of real contribution. KP Botany 23:13, 2 October 2006 (UTC)
Expanding on the above idea, consider the following scenario (which is harder to track for meatpuppetry that the above one): A millionaire from a foreign country pays 150 people, each with a different IP adresses, to edit articles on Wikipedia a few times every day for three to four months. These users are told not to contact each other and that they should try to mantain different editing styles and attitudes. Then, on every week after the first four months, each of these 150 users are nominated one by one on RfA with most of the other 149 users supporting him. Eventually, this continues onwards until all 150 users are admins or possibly even bureaucrats and stewards. The accounts are then given to the millionaire, who uses it to influence articles related to him, whether negatively or positively. Since he controls over 150 admins (each still with their own IP adress), he can recieve a majority consensus in support from any of the debates he is involved in, with the other admins powerless to stop him... -- TBCΦ talk? 23:44, 2 October 2006 (UTC)
It would never work. unless the average IQ of a wikipedia user starts halving any time soon. The same 150 people voting for each other on nominations is bound to rise suspicion. -- Yaksha 01:37, 7 October 2006 (UTC)
What's the best way to deal with articles that have no prose whatsoever, and only consist of an infobox or a track listing? I run across a surprising number of these. (examples: [15] [16]) I've heard that some people delete them under CSD-A1 (Very short articles providing little or no context), though infoboxes usually make it unambiguous what the article is about, and infoboxes do take some time to fill out. On the other hand, these are extremely unsatisfying articles... a random visitor has to do too much work to figure out what the intro sentence should be, and it's not clear how long the article will be in a prose-free state, and the original author could have spent a very short amount of time to enter an introductory sentence. I usually tag them with {{ context}} to try to urge people to add a single sentence. What do other people do in this situation? -- Interiot 08:39, 5 October 2006 (UTC)
I ask this question because I bumped on the article Piet Keizer, which in its first version was a literal translation from [17]. The text has been rephrased later, but some sentences still are a literal translation and it is very obvious what inspired the article. Taka 18:08, 29 September 2006 (UTC)
(edit conflict) Er, that's not correct. A translation is a "derivative work", and may only be copyrighted with the permission of the original copyright holder. Otherwise, it's still a copyright violation. However, with permission from the copyright holder, presumably a translation could be GFDL and the original version not. -- W.marsh 18:45, 29 September 2006 (UTC)
I'm going to say it because it is true. Wikipedia is crap if you happen to be new like me and here's why:
Mike 14:25, 2 October 2006 (UTC)
Mike 14:28, 2 October 2006 (UTC)
Hi Mike. Unfortunately your first experience of Wikipedia is typical of what happens to newish editors contributing their first article. They are by far likely to run afoul of WP:NPOV, WP:NOR, WP:V and WP:RS until they've spent quite some time here. I disagree with Merope somewhat, what happened to you was not a case of WP:BITE as you weren't targeted in your personal capacity. However the articles that were nominated were done so absolutely correctly. If you spend any amount of time on NP Patrol and saw the sheer amount of dross coming into the 'pedia you'd understand why some editors have a "shoot on sight" attitude. Most of the time, it is the only effective way to remove unencyclopedic content before it can "fall below the radar" of the community. Zunaid 12:07, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
Jaranda blocked me without cause and refuses to discuss it.
All of the blockers are on the extreme left— Preceding unsigned comment added by 205.188.117.10 ( talk • contribs)
Likely an autoblock used by an AOL troll I blocked. Jaranda wat's sup 05:12, 8 October 2006 (UTC)
A major problem with Wikipedia is that we have all sorts of stubs—some almost fancruft—floating around and abandoned. I propose a new guideline encouraging user to combine these stubs into a master article, and the way to do that. Think of it as Sumary Style for a bunch of articles, rather than one. For example, imagine how disorganized we were before a bunch of microarticles were combined into Apple Developer Tools. We should do that for a lot of articles. Instead of having lots of stubs, we should have (for example) provide summaries of the Works of Edgar Allan Poe. Some that are really tiny can be merged right in; otherwise, main article links are fine if it would take more than a paragraph or two. This allows consolidation and makes it easier for people to watch one article than watch a bunch. If they are sorted by year (that's one of the details we'd have to decide on) the reader could see the author's style progress over time, even if you only used a few paragraphs for something like the Works of William Shakespeare. And it doesn't have to be literature, either.-- Here T oHelp 12:22, 8 October 2006 (UTC)
A discussion to fix an issue w/A7 and G11 is ongoing at the speedy deletion subpage. -- badlydrawnjeff talk 13:15, 8 October 2006 (UTC)
Someone has created an account to delete all external links to All Music Guide, Discogs, MusicBrainz, and Last.fm, calling them "massive spam" (diff), hence its name of User:NoMass.
Personally I couldn't care less about MusicBrainz or Last.fm, but AMG and Discogs had always been valuable resources and external links for music articles, providing infos about stuff we don't or can't have (such as complete discographies with each edition and variant).
Are they now forbidden on Wikipedia? Is that a side-effect of the new tougher-on-spam policies and quick deletion of spam pages? 62.147.86.81 22:48, 5 October 2006 (UTC)
Moved to Talk:Charizard. 19:07, 8 October 2006 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Mini Talkpage Template Dev920 ( Tory?) 17:35, 8 October 2006 (UTC)
Please see Wikipedia_talk:Naming_conventions: There is a set of proposed conventions for naming articles on controversial events, such as military conflicts and terrorist incidents. Discussion so far indicates that this proposal would codify what is already current practice. Kla'quot 08:57, 9 October 2006 (UTC)
I'm guessing this is one of those items that comes up repeatedly. I know there's a recommendation of signatures being "one line while editing" (which I would say make 80 characters in HTML), but is there any policy? Been seeing more and more 200+ character sigs and would think a policy would be appropriate. Thanks. *Sparkhead 20:23, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
As a matter of principal, I believe freedom of speech, and length thereof shouldn't be limited. --
|
20:27, 10 October 2006 (UTC)
[[Image:SigCommunist.png|15px]]<span style="background-color:#000000; white-space:nowrap; font-variant:small-caps;">[[User:Tom mayfair|<font color="white">P</font><font color="white">r</font><font color="white">e</font><font color="white">m</font><font color="white">i</font><font color="white">e</font><font color="white">r </font><font color="white"> T</font><font color="white">o</font><font color="white">m </font><font color="white">M</font><font color="white">a</font><font color="white">y</font><font color="white">f</font><font color="white">a</font><font color="white">i</font><font color="white">r</font>]]<sup>[[User_talk:Tom mayfair|<font color="white">T</font><font color="white">a</font><font color="white">l</font><font color="white">k</font>]]</sup>[[Image:RedPhone.jpg|15px]]<small><sub>[[Uncyclopedia:Folding@home|<font color="white">F</font><font color="white">@</font><font color="white">H</font>]]</sub></small></span>[[Image:Sucrose_b.gif|30px]][[Image:MUN.png|15px]]
. I'm starting to think maybe a "rehabilitation" program of unsyclopedia users might be in order, they seem to love exessively long image laden transcluded signatures over there. --
Sherool
(talk) 20:46, 10 October 2006 (UTC)I've had a rant on this exact issue linked in my sig for a while. Night Gyr ( talk/ Oy) 21:51, 10 October 2006 (UTC)
This would help to cut down on image trolling.-- Rouge Rosado Oui? 22:27, 7 October 2006 (UTC)
I have to agree with Heretohelp on this one. Whatever policies we have, malicious editors will be able to get around through Commons or sockpuppetts or meatpuppets. That's not the point here: we get a lot of newbies which either are well-intentioned but are uploading copyrighted material or are ill-intentioned but are, shall we say, casual vandals. In many ways, knowing about Commons shows that you're an experienced editor! Pascal.Tesson 19:58, 8 October 2006 (UTC)
I referenced this thread on Bugzilla: bugzilla:7539. Dragons flight 21:57, 9 October 2006 (UTC)
Why are we honoring Nazi and Al-Qaeda copyrights? Examples:
Is it even legal under U.S. law to honor these? Does the Foundation have an opinion? - CrazyRussian talk/ email 03:16, 9 October 2006 (UTC)
You are invited to join a discussion whether we should expand Notability—companies from Fortune 500 & Forbes 500 to Fortune 1000 & Forbes 2000.
The English Wikproject has 6,818,458 articles today. An English Wikproject Articles progress summary follows:
Date | Milestone | Comment |
---|---|---|
January 2001 | 100 articles | |
April 2001 | 1,000 articles | |
October 2001 | 10,000 articles | |
January 2003 | 100,000 articles | |
February 2004 | 200,000 articles | |
July 2004 | 300,000 articles | 155 days since the 200,000th article. |
Nov 2004 | 400,000 articles | 130 days since the 300,000th article. |
March 2005 | 500,000 articles | 117 days since the 400,000th article. |
June 2005 | 600,000 articles | Approx. 93 days since the 500,000th article. |
August 2005 | 700,000 articles | 68 days since the 600,000th article. |
Nov 2005 | 800,000 articles | 68 days since the 700,000th article. |
4 Jan 2006 | 900,000 articles | 64 days since the 800,000th article. |
1 Mar 2006 | 1,000,000 articles | 58 days since the 900,000th article. |
26 Apr 2006 | 1,100,000 articles | 56 days since the 1,000,000th article. |
19 June 2006 | 1,200,000 articles | 54 days since the 1,100,000th article. |
6 August 2006 | 1,300,000 articles | 48 days since the 1,200,000th article. |
24 September 2006 | 1,400,000 articles | 49 days since the 1,300,000th article. |
The point— the English Wikproject continues to expand. There are a number of main articles that need to be written still (e.g., all Fortune 500 companies do not yet have articles); none-the-less much of the current expansion is coming in the form of specialized articles in relatively narrow fields based on individual contributor’s interests. Wikipedia is an important research tool because it provides depth in areas that traditional encyclopedias don’t; it becomes more important as it expands. The trend to more specialized articles is not only acceptable; it is desirable. May first come to Wikipedia when they note that “Googles” on obscure topics turn up Wikipedia answers. Many stay because there is information in the Wikipedia that can’t be found anywhere else (at least in English). The English Wikproject becomes ever more valuable as a research tool as it goes into ever more specialized topics.
At some point we will fill out all the Fortune 500 and Forbes 500 companies. At that time it makes sense to continue down to the : Fortune 1000 and Forbes 2000 companies. Although I’d like to see creation of a Wikiproject:companies and corporations with a concerted effort to complete the articles on the Fortune 500 and Forbes 500, articles on Wikipedia are normally contributed in piecemeal fashion and someone later comes along to systematize the structure with a Wikiproject. Hence this expansion of criteria can be argued to be just a continuation of the normal process.
Come join the debate & consensus building if you care about the topic—support and opposition are equally welcome, as long as the comment is thoughtful. Skål - Williamborg ( Bill) 04:38, 9 October 2006 (UTC)
Just came across Robert Parkyn, a City of Calgary, Alberta alderman from 1926 to 1944. Someone is putting in the entire historical list of Calgary aldermen. Is this is a good thing or a bad thing? -- John Nagle 05:10, 9 October 2006 (UTC)
This Portal seems to be at the heart of a massive project to build galleries of maps for every nation and continent (separate from the existing geography pages) that's against a basic tenet of wp:not -- wikipedia's not for galleries. There are over 200 articles involved here so I'd like to get more input before I take this to deletion. It seems like all the pages should be transwikied to commons and linked from the appropriate geography articles, so we can have a neat little box that says "wikimedia commons has maps of x" without filling wikipedia with pages that aren't articles. Night Gyr ( talk/ Oy) 06:32, 9 October 2006 (UTC)
If a vandal's real name, address, and phone number are known (such as if they put it on their personal website) can Wikipedia send a cease and decist or a restraining order to stop them from vandalizing? This is not hypothetical. Anomo 12:08, 9 October 2006 (UTC)
Hi. We're having a discussion over at Wikipedia talk:Civility#The use of sarcasm regarding the list of "petty examples" of incivility "that contribute to an uncivil environment". In particular, there's some disagreement over whether or not "sarcasm" is an example of a behavior that contributes to an incivil environment. Since there are two people seeing it one way and two people seeing in a different way, I thought it might help to request broader input. Thanks in advance to anyone willing to contribute their perspective to the conversation. - GTBacchus( talk) 16:10, 9 October 2006 (UTC)
Quick policy question. I notice that Chips Ahoy! was deleted by Improv ( talk · contribs · blocks · protections · deletions · page moves · rights · RfA) under the new G11 WP:CSD. In determining the scope of the new rule, can we differentiate between spamvertisements and legit articles about products that happen to be sold commercially? Improv's action seems to meet the letter of the policy, it's the spirit of it that I'm concerned about. - CHAIRBOY ( ☎) 17:06, 9 October 2006 (UTC)
CHAIRBOY ( ☎) 17:49, 9 October 2006 (UTC)Blatant advertising. Pages which only promote a company, product, group or service and which would need to be fundamentally rewritten in order to become encyclopedic.
What really bothers me here is that I strongly believe that G11 is badly needed and I dismissed as paranoid those who believed that this would not be applied carelessly. It appears however that this is not quite the case so far. Maybe admins should be rebriefed about the intention here. In the Pepperidge Farm article for instance, two thirds of the article are a list of their cookies. That's advertising? No problem, delete that but there's no need to delete the article. Chips Ahoy! says these cookies are yummy? Well delete that but we're talking about a cookie brand that's almost part of North American pop culture. Please admins: don't give G11 a bad name by going on crusade. Actually, I think that we should have a few weeks where admins are strongly discouraged to G11 anything where the tag has not been applied by someone else. Pascal.Tesson 20:06, 9 October 2006 (UTC)
This is in response to some discussion I've been seeing (primarily at WP:RfA, but elsewhere as well.
I think we should standardise what we use to determine as consensus.
To start:
I think the minimum of 5 should be required to prevent WP:BITE, and just any sort of bullying. ("Me and my two friends say what goes around here, in this here article.")
And I think the minimum should deal with issues which currently require the "higher" percents of 75-80.
Yes, I realize that many see voting as evil, but that's not necessarily what I am talking about. Counting heads is not the same as determining consensus.
Interested in hearing pros and cons. - jc37 19:59, 9 October 2006 (UTC)
Perhaps this is a little off-topic, but what I really dislike here is that when things are decided by general consensus, expert opinions -- especially in the sciences -- are given no more weight than anyone else's. You get situations where a majority of rather clueless individuals basically ends up dictating how specialists can organize and write their articles. It's like the arts department always gets a say in how things are done in the chemistry department; not very efficient and rather depressing for the chemistry department, even if the arts department means well. Why can't this situation be improved? Frankly, I believe Wikipedia looses a lot of potential editors this way who might otherwise be writing fantastic articles for us. -- Jwinius 02:15, 10 October 2006 (UTC)
Well, if things like the Taxobox is ignored...what makes you think it'll be less ignored if the article title is changed? For all we know, changing titles of articles to scientific names could make the article in general more ignored. Either way, it's just speculation. The bottom line is, this isn't about biology. Biologists may know their biology, but they don't nessasarily know how to write an encyclopedia. Nor do they nessasarily know how to organise or present information in a wiki environment. Does remaning the article make editors take it more seriously? readers? teachers? are the public actually confused by the use of common names and not scientific ones, would using scientific names actually make it easier for everyone? Although using scientific names would make organization easier for those familiar with taxonomy, but wouldn't it make organization far harder for those who are NOT familiar with taxnomy? (which is the majority of editors here.)
Let's say in a school, the biologists run their department and their expert opinion is respected, but they will probably still have to consult the finance people when it comes to money issues, and listen to the maintainance folk when it comes to their building, because they're not experts in that area. Similarly here, experts may be experts in one area of knowledge, but they are not nessasarily experts in running/organizing/maintaining an encyclopedia, if anything, the long term editors here know more about what makes a wiki work than so called experts.
Giving experts a say when there is a content disagreement may well be a good idea in theory, but there are still major problems with that (who is an expert? how do you prove someone's an expert? All it takes is a few idiots pretending to be experts and messing things up for the community to lose all trust in the claim of expertise); but giving science-experts the say in how to organize and how to write an encyclopedia? Sorry, but i can't agree. All the problems you have outlined are not biology problems, but organization and presentation problems. And i suspect this is often the case when experts (or when people such as you) are advocating for experts to have more say - it's more say in how to run the place. And not so much more say in content. -- `/aksha 23:51, 11 October 2006 (UTC)
...and not one in any language I know. It actually hurts my eyes. Can you please try to spell it correctly? It is a very basic principle in Wikipedia and deserves this tiny bit of respect. Thanks. -- Stephan Schulz 22:44, 9 October 2006 (UTC)
Please - anyone can make a typing error. Let's not make fun of another user.-- Runcorn 19:37, 11 October 2006 (UTC)
I was discussing whether we legally need to give credit to the photographer of a creative commons Attribution-ShareAlike on the article page. I can't imagine we legally need to do so. If so, we need to edit a whole lot of articles to credit photographers. Garion96 (talk) 22:34, 9 October 2006 (UTC)
How do I get a URL added to the automatic block list? -- ArmadilloFromHell 04:37, 10 October 2006 (UTC)
Hi everyone, I would like to know whether there are any guidelines for disambiguation pages about the country names, such as Italy (disambiguation) or Germany (disambiguation). There is a revert war on Russia (disambiguation): one opinionated user attempts to list all Russian states throughout history, such as Kievan Rus or Republic of Novgorod. Such a list would be endless. I don't think anyone would search for "Republic of Novgorod" under "Russia"; there is really no ambiguity here. Furthermore, he adds to the article numerous "see also"s, leading to irrelevant articles such as Rugians. User:Mikkalai tried to talk with him (without avail); I hope that a wider discussion of the issue will be productive. Please share your opinions. -- Ghirla -трёп- 09:12, 10 October 2006 (UTC)
I have looked through Wikipedia’s Help Section but have not found it very useful (I’m sorry) in dealing with this, so I am asking for help here…
I have been frustrated trying to edit what may be a “vanity” post, and one with what I thought is a particular noticeable POV. The article in question is on libertarian author Jim Powell. The original author keeps making and remaking the same changes and undoing other's edits.
He deletes references to Powell’s current publisher. The current publisher is a conservative political press, not an academic one. Since Powell contends he is a historian I think this is relevant information and did my best to add it without any POV.
The original author keeps adding what could be considered “puff words” about all the libraries Powell uses. Anybody can use a library. Does it make the author more believable if he lists the many he visited? Judging from his book’s footnotes he relies on secondary sources and not archives.
The original author keeps re-added phrases about how great Powell’s writing is. Fine, but there is no sourcing and no reference to any possible negative reviews.
FYI: I noticed the IP address that wrote the article and that continues to edit it can be traced to a Travel Agency in new York City. Powell used to write for travel magazine in NYC. Possible sock-puppet??
I started a talk page on the original article but the original author has ignored it.
Hanover81 14:34, 10 October 2006 (UTC)
Are first person accounts appropriate for Wikipedia? I was in a train wreck a number of years ago. When I found an entry for it I posted a first account of my experience which was pretty remarkable (I was shot out the train and landed on the tracks). Another person, a very experienced Wiki contributor, deleted it saying that first person accounts are inappropriate. Is this correct?
Taganwiki 21:31, 10 October 2006 (UTC)
(edit conflict)
Agreed. This would come down to "own research". I've gotten to the point where I've even been deleting perfectly believeable stuff that I myself wrote before, but didn't supply any references for. I've also been telling other people that if they have some interesting experiences to share, just publish it somewhere else first -- your own hope page for all I care -- and then perhaps we'll quote and reference you (alas, most of them suffer from writer's block). In this case you could do it all on your own -- just don't try to plagiarize yourself, as that would set a bad example! :-)) -- Jwinius 22:45, 10 October 2006 (UTC)
Thanks all for the clarification - I am new to this. Actually most of my account was recorded in TV interviews and newspaper articles right after the accident. So I would need to reference those shorter peices rather than the longer and more complete summary that I just wrote. Incidentially some of those articles had errors in them so sometimes the secondary sources are not as reliable as primary.
Taganwiki 23:59, 10 October 2006 (UTC)
A word of caution. Publish it somewhere on the web you can well do, but I doubt very much that it would be considered a reliable source, and any other editor would be justified in removing it. It is preferable to use news articles and the like, as these are mostly considered to be reliable. In response to your last argument, we are after verifiabily, not truth. Zunaid 10:33, 11 October 2006 (UTC)
I see that Ook!_programming_language has been deleted. When I read Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Ook! programming language I see that there was no consensus. Does "no consensus" mean delete an article? -- SGBailey 22:28, 10 October 2006 (UTC)
As AOL uses a system where multiple users have the same IP address, we end up with the rather bothersome situation where people are being locked out of Wikipedia for the actions of other user on their IP. In effect, a thousand people are being punished for the acts of one.
Might I suggest that AOL users be made to create accounts if they wish to edit wiki articles? I know that seems somewhat unfair, but as stated, so many people are using the same address simulataneously that if one user gets punished, the rest get punished unfairly. If AOL users were made to create accounts before they were allowed to edit, then instead of blocking the IP, only the accounts that were causing problems would get blocked. HalfShadow 02:36, 11 October 2006 (UTC)
All editors with an interest in good sourcing are invited to review a proposal to replace Wikipedia:No original research and Wikipedia:Verifiability with one policy: Wikipedia:Attribution. The proposal picks up the key points from NOR and V, and has some additional allowances regarding the types of sources used in pop culture articles, to make things easier for editors working in that area. The proposal cuts out the fluff from NOR and V; and having one policy rather than two should reduce the potential for confusion and inconsistency. SlimVirgin (talk) 10:30, 11 October 2006 (UTC)
What's the policy/procedure regarding the blocking of IPs that are of an institution with multiple computers using the same IP? Take for example 193.171.151.129. Do we keep blocking the school for 24-hour periods and hope one day it'll stop? And what does the "efforts will be made to contact [school] to report network abuse" mean? Who will do this? - newkai t- c 14:31, 11 October 2006 (UTC)
An article I was watching was recently proposed for deletion. I replied about this on the talk page, but was ignored and the article was deleted without any arguments to counter mine. Is this how it's supposed to happen? The article in question was QDB.us. Peaceduck 16:48, 11 October 2006 (UTC)
I had the idea of a policy on Wikipedia, in which if a registered user accumulates a certain number of blocks (100?) of any length and/or form, he/she is permanantly/indefinitely banned from ediitng Wikipedia. The fact is, there are some users that just never learn. I'm not going to point any fingers, but I have seen some users with incredibly long block logs and warnings, but that keep going at it (whatever it may be: vandalism, pushing POV, disrespect for other users, etc). Of course, this scenario is very unlikely and most users do eventualy stop if they have accumulated enough blocks, but in some cases this might sort out some problems. Any comments? -- Nautica Shad e s 19:57, 11 October 2006 (UTC)
I have a question - if an editor is an administrator on another language Wikipedia or sister project, but there is evidence that he/she is breaking WP policies and behaving in a disruptive and boorish fashion on the English Wikipedia, can action be taken against that editor on the project where he/she is an administrator, based on this evidence? Rama's arrow 20:32, 11 October 2006 (UTC)
The nutshell version of WP:AUTO appears to be confusing and too 'agressive'. Comments appreciated at Wikipedia_talk:Autobiography#Confusing_nuthsell.-- Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus | talk 20:35, 11 October 2006 (UTC)
Browsing through random articles, I came across a rather strange dispute: Joko Beck. I've read the debates (here, there, and everywhere), and I was quite suprised by the power that a complaint made directly to "those above" has. Although I understand the reasoning behind the removal of the content, I can't help thinking that if there had been no threat, no-one would have considered the content a problem (especially since it could have been phrased: "Beck claims to have these clients: ..."). This lead me to think that we should have a tag for saying that external complaints or legal threats have played a part in making the article what it is. At least we'd know when the content really is community-based, and when it's been decided by the powers that be. Any ideas? yandman 21:37, 11 October 2006 (UTC)
Exactly: WP:BLP#Using_the_subject_as_a_source. "When information supplied by the subject conflicts with unsourced statements in the article, the unsourced statements should be removed.". The statement "Beck claims to have these clients: .... " is sourced, by his statements, and these are reliable in that context. To sum it up: A statement made by a person is a reliable source concerning that statement. How can that not be so? yandman 11:56, 12 October 2006 (UTC)
Should we semiprotect Wikipedia:User page? It looks like it gets destroyed a few times a day by some new user trying to create their own user page. Fan-1967 20:58, 12 October 2006 (UTC)
I am sick and tired of seeing fanatical POV-pushers taking over wikipedia articles. A detailed explanation of this is at User:Nikodemos/Asymmetric controversy and User:Infinity0/Wiki disclaimer. What I suggest is simple.
*in the article/template namespace and any others prone to dispute, but not talk pages
My first proposal for x would be 10. See, this does not harm normal people in any way, since 10 edits is quite a lot, and there is always a preview button. But, this would really slow down disputes, where two or more people keep editing against each other. -- infinity 0 23:02, 12 October 2006 (UTC)
And I don't mean "If they make x+1 edits they get blocked", I mean "it is technically impossible to make more than x edits to the same article in one day." -- infinity 0 23:07, 12 October 2006 (UTC)
Actually Wikipedia adopted a new guideline last month to deal with disruption. Check out WP:DE. Regards, Durova 19:39, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
This is in response to some discussions I've been seeing (primarily at WP:RfA, but elsewhere as well).
I think we should standardise what we use to determine consensus.
I am breaking the earlier suggestion into two separate groups for discussion. - jc37 00:06, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
(Originally I suggested 5. I would be interested in discussing rationales for quorum numbers.)
I think the minimum of 6 should be required to prevent WP:BITE, and just any sort of bullying. ("Me and my two friends say what goes around here, in this here article.") - jc37 00:06, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
---
I think the minimum should deal with several issues of cases which currently require the "higher" percents of 75-80. - jc37 00:06, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
In almost every case these simple rules are working fairly well. Yes, it does lead to odd compromises or stalls progress but I think that trying to codify the whole thing will make things worse. Pascal.Tesson 21:51, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
There is currently a debate within the Quebec bashing Discussion page dealing with the propriety of using Vigile.net as an intermediate source. [22] Of the 56 unique references currently cited, 21 direct the user to the Vigile.net website. The debate began with my objection. In short, my argument is as follows: 1) Vigile.net appears to be posting newspaper and magazine articles without permission, as such the accuracy of the transcriptions is called into question; 2) Vigile.net is a website with a clear political agenda, meaning the user is being directed not to the source, but to a biased intermediate website. It is my opinion that this runs counter to WP:RS guidelines; in particular that covered by the "Partisan, religious and extremist websites" section. I'd be interested in the views of others on this issue. Victoriagirl 02:19, 14 October 2006 (UTC)
I have made a proposal for introducing a seperate namespace for lists. Please suggest your views. Your response to the proposal is invited on proposal page. Shyam ( T/ C) 19:03, 14 October 2006 (UTC)
What's the policy for signing your prod's? Are you suppose to, or should you just let the history do the talking for you? - Royalguard11( Talk· Desk) 20:43, 14 October 2006 (UTC)
If there is an Wikipedia entry about an entry and there are few outside references in order to explain it, Can one use various in context sections from the site and juxtapose them with contradictory quotes written by the same author in order to give readers a better understanding of this entry.
I ask because a casual visitor to the site may not notice anything but more indepth research into the many articles gives a clearer picture of the biases inherrant in the site.
I want to do this as objectively as possible and this seems to be a way.
Can one also take assertations from the site that are presented as facts and juxtapose them with facts from a objective reliable source. Of course this would be all done with links to the subject matter and references quoted.
I would like to write this but want to do it objectively. As an example one can juxtapose recorded words and actions by a politician that are contradictory to give an accurate portrayal of who they really are. as long as what you write is true.-- Robbow123 00:19, 15 October 2006 (UTC)
I would like to know whether it is appropriate for several wikipedians of the same nationality, involved in a content dispute with wikipedians of another nationality, to use their native tongue for communication on their talk pages. When I requested them to provide a translation, my request was dismissed as "insulting". Is there any policy on this? I recall that in the past, when most people on Romanian and Polish noticeboards spoke to each other in their native languages and ignored requests to translate their communications into English, their conduct was reprimanded as stimulating evolution of national cliques. -- Ghirla -трёп- 13:47, 16 October 2006 (UTC)
I also want to know what meausures I can undertake against somebody who explicitely insulted me of being a conspirator. Let's say that a X user who has no idea about the FA criteria, gets involved in a FA review, gets exposed by me because of his ignorance and then desperately tries to get revenge on me. As a result, he explitely accuses me of being a "conspirator", without any evidence. I really want to know if I can file an official complaint against him for this humiliating and unbacked slanders. I also want to know what punishment this user may face.-- Yannismarou 14:07, 16 October 2006 (UTC)
As for the original comment, I could not initially find a policy or guide on the use of foreign languages on talk pages, certainly if it was used a lot it could be considered anti-social and is likely to reflect badly on the users involved, if users were using non-english to deliberately confuse another editor then this would more serious. Martin 14:25, 16 October 2006 (UTC)
Ghirla's comments are aggressive elsewhere. Yannismarou is an excellent new editor, who has managed in very little time create Wikiproject:History of Greece and three (four?) Featured articles. Accusations for conspiracy, however, are not an excuse for strong language. Indeed, it is considered good 'wikiquette' to write in English. Ghirla, it is considered good 'wikiquette' not to accuse anyone (of conspiracy or whatever) unless there are solid proofs (diffs) to support it. On the other hand, WP cannot and has not forced English in the talk-pages. Furthermore, if someone indeed wants to 'conspire', they can do it via the perfectly the untraceable e-mail feature (in any language they feel like). Please try to solve this between yourselves, and keep WP:AGF as well as WP:AAGF in mind. My talk is welcoming for your further comments (this is not the place). •NikoSilver• 14:46, 16 October 2006 (UTC)
Someone just added a "history" of the city of Scappoose, Oregon on its talk page. I was about to commend the editor for his or her addition and point out that we would need better citation, etc., before the material was added to the main article. Then I read the whole thing and noticed this fine piece of creative writing moved from history to POV to patent nonsense. I am tempted to blank it, but I'd like some opinions first. Thanks! Katr67 16:00, 16 October 2006 (UTC)
If it's a temporary content fork just to work on it a bit, it might be more productive for everyone if it was worked on in userspace, or at least not on the talk page (though a link to it could be left on the talk page so people are aware of it). If it's a permanent content fork (eg. they don't intend to follow our core policies and don't intend to ever integrate it back in), then that's discouraged, and speedy archiving might be appropriate. -- Interiot 16:22, 16 October 2006 (UTC)
It seems to me that in most articles that give information on how to pronounce a particular word, a bizarre, esoteric code is given. What kind of people use such a code, dare I ask? And how high are their ivory towers? And more to the point, what proportion of the English-speaking population would understand such a code? One in a million might be generous.
Example, from Zeitgeist:
Zeitgeist ((audio) (help·info)) is originally a German expression that means "the spirit (Geist) of the time (Zeit)". It denotes the intellectual and cultural climate of an era. The German pronunciation of the word is [ˈtsa͡ɪtga͡ɪst]
ˈtsa͡ɪtga͡ɪst??? Oh, now I understand!
Why not just use a simplier code? Perhaps 'zIt-gIst" -- or just say that it rhymes with, oh, I don't know, "mice fight".
Cheers. Chris 20:33, 16 October 2006 (UTC)
I support using IPA to illustrate pronunciation because ultimately, there are no better options. However, I think we should go for phonemic rather than phonetic transcription. This makes the learning curve much easier for those unfamiliar with IPA, illustrating the pronunciation while allowing for dialectical differences. There's no need to go into absolutely precise detail. For example, a transcription doesn't need to show that initial "t" is generally aspirated in English, or that vowels preceding nasal consonants (like m or n) take on a nasal quality. szyslak ( t, c, e) 21:26, 16 October 2006 (UTC)
I'm terribly sorry if this comes accross as incivil in any way, but the following discourse just made me pull a spit-take (with a partly chewed bagel, nontheless):
Did it ever strike you being just ever so slightly absurd to willfully remain ignorant on a matter when you're attempting to co-author an encyclopedia? We should all be willing to learn new things here. -- tjstrf 22:20, 16 October 2006 (UTC)
I think there should be a waiting period for adding spoilers to an article - maybe like a month after it's release/showing/etc. Pokemon Diamond and Pearl is rife with storyline spoilers. it's impossible to help edit the article without uncovering a spoiler. -- 172.163.213.41 05:24, 17 October 2006 (UTC)
I have been falsely accused of personal attacks and threatened with account blocking by a user named Hkelkar. This user has taken control of the article above and removes any discussion he disagrees with. The lates case, a comment I entered in the Talk:Indian caste system with teh title "Inextricability from Hinduism", which has been removed twice in an arbitrary way. Please be aware that this sort of things are happening in Wikipedida.-- tequendamia 07:44, 17 October 2006 (UTC)
He refuses to even discuss with me, only edit-war and disrupt.Can somebody at least get him to calm down and discuss civilly with other editors? Hkelkar 08:26, 17 October 2006 (UTC)
Wikibooks now has Special:Import enabled for transwikiing from wikipedia. We're not quite ready for the big show (we want our "Transwiki:" pseudonamespace turned into a true namespace first for smooth interwikilinking...material in that namespace will now be permanent redirects so wikipedians can find things they're looking for), but I have begun to transwiki recipes into the "Cookbook:" namespace (keep in mind there are very few wikibooks administrators, so clearing the wikipedia backlogs will take some time).
The most recent discussion about this is here, which was where we voted for it, but transwikis from wikibooks have long been a contentious issue for a lot of the wikibookians, because in the past things tended to just get dropped there willy-nilly (often without pagehistories, etc.), sand more often than not just ended up being deleted.
So we're hoping a few policies can be changed here on wikipedia to take full advantage of our shiny new tool. First, we'd like to call an end to copy-paste transwikis (the current mood is to ban copy-paste in lieu of import on the wikibooks side, so the policy here should probably reflect that). Any wikipedian wishing to have something transwikied to wikibooks can simply make the request at Wikibooks:Requests for Import. I personally will bee keeping an eye on Category:Copy to Wikibooks and Category:Articles containing how-to sections, but most of the other admins aren't particularly interested (with the exception of Uncle_G, who I believe is also an administrator on wikipedia).
Second, I'd like to have a few templates/categories we can use to inform both the authors of the articles and the "WP:NOT" patrollers that the transwiki has taken place, and the article can either be switched to a soft redirect, cleaned up to remove how-to/textbookish material, or just deleted. I had made some templates for this a month or so ago, but a bot came through and cleared them out (I never could figure out why), so I'd prefer to leave this part of the work to some more experienced wikipedians (also, the onus of the actual importing and cleaning up on the wikibooks side will most likely be squarely on my shoulders, so I'd rather just watch the policy than try to take part in it).
Templates of the following ilks would be useful:
I should point out that I'm a wikipedian also, and part of why I'm doing the importing is to help the cleanup process here, as well as preventing mess-making there. I'm also a follower of the ism that wikipedia is not doomed, but in some topic areas, wikipedia is more or less done: the only way to improve a lot of the articles is to actually make textbooks out of them, which definitely goes into realms well beyond the limits set by WP:NOT. Wikibooks can be nearly anything, as long as they're NPOV, instructional, and factual: hopefully wikipedians who've already written all they could on their areas of expertise might want to bring it a step further. (Yes, I am plugging a bit here, but after spending a bunch of time wikifying, there is a certain perverse pleasure in de-wikifying :-).) ---- SB_Johnny| talk| books 11:34, 17 October 2006 (UTC)