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What's going on with capitalization in bird articles? I thought Wikipedia style was to capitalize only proper names and the first word of an article name; under that assumption I recently moved Barred Owl to Barred owl. But then I got to poking around other articles about birds and discovered a huge number of them have persistent capitalization: look at the names on the List of Oklahoma birds and List of Canadian birds, for example. It's really surprisingly consistent. And in one case at least, there are two different articles distinguished only by capitalization: Barn owl is about the family of Tytonidae, while Barn Owl is about a specific species, Tyto alba. Is there some special policy regarding capitalization in birds' names that I'm unaware of? Should I move Barred owl back to Barred Owl to be consistent? -- Angr/ comhrá 01:03, 15 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Okay, thanks. Dsmdgold has already moved Barred owl back to Barred Owl for me. But I still think it's weird to have Barn owl and Barn Owl be entirely different articles. -- Angr/ comhrá 07:20, 15 Apr 2005 (UTC)
There is an article on here about Star Wars, right. So would I be allowed to post an article about characters or planets from some sort of fan-made thing about Star Wars? Just wanted to know so I don't throw it on and have it knocked back off, I'd prefer it to just never be.
Is there a standard for the size of the criticisms sections in articles on religions, new religious movements, sects, and cults? Most religious movements have documented notable criticisms and vocal ex-member critics in the real world but only some of them have a criticism section here in Wikipedia. Some criticisms even have their own article, like Scientology, Prem Rawat and Sathya Sai Baba. This could be interpreted as unfair.
I am very well aware that this is a highly controversial subject and an almost endless subject of debate among scholars and scientists who study cults. Andries 16:55, 14 Apr 2005 (UTC)
The image about Ugaritic alphabet was taken from a PDF file, provided by Unicode.org. The uploader does mention the source but the first page of that document says: "You may freely use these code charts for personal and internal business uses only. You may not incorporate them either wholly or in part into any product or publication, or otherwise distribute them without express written permission from the Unicode Consortium. However, you may provide links to these charts". In my opinion it does not allow to publish it even under fairuse until the Unicode Consortium allows it and nothing is mentioned about that. What is a general policy about such cases (any place to report it?) and should I mark the image with {{vfd}}?
The discussion as to the appropriateness of using templates or tranclusion as votes (notably in VfD debates), has been moved to Wikipedia talk:Survey guidelines#Voting via templates. Please read and reply there. -- Netoholic @ 14:41, 2005 Apr 14 (UTC)
I'm new, and this may have been discussed before, but would someone please explain to me why so much dubious stuff gets shot out of here to reappear under aliases like lockergnome.com? I tend to wander around the lists, and I have found a dismaying trend where someone thinks a list of something is a good idea, starts it, does little if any research for it, gets bored with it, abandons it, and there it sits. Except it doesn't.
It's one thing to have this kind of stub pretending it's a real boy hanging around here. But they pop up in too many other places on the internet. Just one small but painful example - the List of Egg Dishes. Go look at it. Then go google egg dishes. What is the point here? Why oh why oh why? I do not even dare to check up on where the Wiki "List of cookbooks" may have gone.
Is anyone checking passes at the exit door?
flummoxed, Mothperson 19:48, 12 Apr 2005 (UTC)
moved from WP:AN/I (by User:Dbachmann):
You know, it seems to me (and frankly I'm quite new here) that one reason why a supermajority is required for a "rough consensus" is that there is a huge skew in the sampling. Sure, we can say that 57% of the people who voted support deletion--but that's 57% of what? I'm sure there's a lot of self-selection going in who votes--I don't think anyone can claim it's a fair sampling of "the community." Anyway, I think this error is one reason that hasn't been mentioned in this discussion about why 57% isn't the same as consensus. Demi T/ C 19:34, 2005 Apr 12 (UTC)
While I enjoyed very much the nude picture of Kate Winslet on Titanic (1997 movie), I wonder if it's necessary to show such a screen shot on this page of the encyclopedia. It's rather irresponsible to just leave it there with just a 'spoiler' warning, for any nine year old kid to see it. -- 23:56, 11 Apr 2005 (UTC)
On Wikipedia, we have a lot of material that could be actually shocking from the point of view of a 9-year old. We have graphic photographs and textual descriptions of torture, wars, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and other crimes. For instance, we have a famous image of a little girl burnt by napalm and fleeing naked her destroyed village.
I think that in comparison to all of this, a scene with a pair of blurry tits is really.. tame and not shocking. I also wonder why nobody seriously suggests we bowdlerize history and remove all the very shocking and gory detail, include some details that children may easily relate to, while a little sexy stuff gets heated reaction.
Furthermore, in my experience, young children (elementary school age and below) don't have a prurient interest in naked bodies. This comes later, with the beginnings of puberty. David.Monniaux 08:26, 12 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Of course, a photo of napalmed children is pertinent to the articles it illustrates, while the blurry tits are not. - Nunh-huh 08:29, 12 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Something that is missed in many of these discussions is that while Wikipedia is not censored for minors, the thrust of that guideline has to do with noticing and reverting vandalism and the lack of centralized control over content. It doesn't marry us to avoiding common sense and discretion when deciding how best to treat a subject. Demi T/ C 11:26, 2005 Apr 12 (UTC)
Demi: "If forced to vote...". The image has been nominated for deletion at wp:ifd under yesterday's date. Thryduulf 12:34, 12 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Every article in Wikipedia that doesn’t cite at least one source for the information in the article hurts the credibility of Wikipedia. From my browsing, it appears that most, at least many, of Wikipedia’s articles have this problem. I assume I don’t need to go into how the lack of sources for any article hurts Wikipedia’s credibility, as that is fairly obvious. An, perhaps not so noticeable, effect is that time spent arguing VfD and other issues, would be reduced by a focus on sources over “Importance” etc. and the focus of these discussion should be around verifiability. However, for the purpose of this post, I want to address how Wikipedia can resolve this potential for crisis.
My first proposal is an innovation in the coding for pages to contain tags to identify the integrity rating for the information. Information not sourced is given a 0. Information with a source that hasn’t been checked is 1. A source that has been checked and is still questionable is given a 2. Checked, Accurate and Impeachable sources earn a statement(s) a grade of 3. This way, editors know if a source/statement has been checked. Perhaps color-coded text or background could readily relay the status of the statement as in relation to verifiability. Not only must we ensure that the referenced source exists, but that information attributed to source is actually included in the source.
Second is prevention of unsourced contributions. A better interface to help contributors add footnotes, references and sources would help. Perhaps a prompt for source before new information is added. Find someway to make adding sources easy enough contributors aren’t “put off” by being required to provide citations.
Thirdly, combining the “What’s In; What’s Out”, “What Wikipedia Is Not” and “Importance” is one coherent document based on verifiability as the first level of assessment as opposed to the 5 point system we currently have. (NOTE: I propose keeping the 5-point system as the second level of assessment.)
Finally, I would like to say that I see checking our sources and insisting on the data to verify the information in Wikipedia as being paramount over other tasks we encourage editors to perform, especially deletions. The problem is: source checking isn’t as fun as starting a deletion debate and in fact is real work. Therefore, fact confirmation should be given the same level of division of tasks as other areas: (based on the above 0-3 coding system) such as “find articles without sources”, “verify sources and information”, “review questionable sources.” By implementing the code system, we can auto generate lists of articles with statements coded 0, 1, or 2 to facilitate these lists. Additionally, we should give contributors a chance to revise their articles and include source information before we proceed to the drastic step of deleting articles. AboutWestTulsa 20:32, 10 Apr 2005 (UTC)
A serious question What level our citations are we looking for. Wikipedia is not (as far as I can tell) like a peer reviewed academic journal. Here is an article Lewis B. Schwellenbach. If you don't feel like looking, it is a biography of about nine paragraphs about a guy who held several U. S. government positions in the 1940s. The sources listed are a cover article from TIME magazine from 1945, McCullough's biography of Truman, and the Department of Labor website. Do you want each sentence footnoted? Do you want a citation for the fact that he was born in Superior Wisconsin? He had a minor connection to the Manhattan project, can I just say that it was the secret project to develop the atomic bomb without citing a source for that? The article says that he replaced Francis Perkins as secretary of labor; do you want a citation to show that she was indeed the previous secretary of labor? I realize these sound like silly questions, but if you want to make a policy, I think that we have to draw a bright line.
Many of the articles I work on are biographies of U.S. government officials from (say) 1930 to 1980. Certain common facts come up often, but I don't bother citing (e.g. Johnson became president after Kennedy was killed in November of 1963) because I don't think that tracking down a citation for that would be terribly useful. It sounds to me like you are looking for a redesign of the whole system. Morris 01:34, Apr 11, 2005 (UTC)
Citing sources and references is important. I'd like to see much more of it. I just want to point out that traditional encyclopedias are not particularly punctilious about this either. Encyclopedias are not expected to meet the same standard as scholarly journals. And in traditional encyclopedias It's not always possible even to find the name of an article's author, let alone contact them. For example, Encarta's article about Jack London has no source, and the author is not identifiable. Dpbsmith (talk) 01:58, 11 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I do appreciate everyone's comments. We seem to have gotten a little off the prelim. proposal I started which really only had 3 points. VfD is ONE area where I see that better policy of sources and verifiability may help, but is not the main point from my original post and being is discussed elsewhere. I really wanted to try to spur policy discussions on 1) Creating a SIMPLE system to track fact checking, 2) Make sure any new policy is concisely presented to new users, 3) Reconcile diverging policies on what's in Wikipedia to be centered around verifiability.
In trying to reach consensus, as based on the objections above, I don't think the first element has really been addressed. If someone bothers to check facts, why not record the results on Discussion pages? If we do, why not have a policy/template for how to record fact checking results? The second element is also a must but should incorporate the reconcile part of the third element. As a new user myself, I am telling the community that we need to better prepare new users for contributing to Wikipedia. Trying to get a grasp on the 10 different policy articles about what articles are appropriate for Wikipedia (which sometimes conflict each other) is too confusing, and new contributors are likely to disregard. However, I think if we do reconcile these conflicting documents, then perhaps you are right, we don't have to go too far in making demands for a source for every statement in every article. AboutWestTulsa 16:42, 14 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Recently, articles about Taiwan were under massive votes for changing the titles from XXX of Taiwan to XXX of ROC. Although the initial votes could be justified based on the Naming convention, the results of these votes almost invariably failed to be passed due to the POV nature of the topic and also the lack of a consensus on the issue. However, in the past few days, another round of voting attempting to change the titles of Taiwan-related articles again was waged by the same single Wikipedian and this really affects the pace of many Wikipedians who concerns about this issue and have to make efforts to engage into the same arguement over and over again.
Without suspecting any ulterior intention for this Wikipedian, who I believe to be a truely enthusiastic editor, I believe this tireless efforts targeting on Taiwan-related articles and making other wikipedians have to repetitively engage into the same dispute over and aover again is really problematic. From the previous voting experiences, I believe that the same wikipedian know it very well that such repetitive vote would not only be another futile attempt butl also be irritating to other contributers.
As a general rule, I wonder if we can enact a Double Jeopardy Policy on votes so that once a debate is over, no one should wage another vote based on the very same reason for a certain amount of time, unless a general consensus was gathered from the discussion page. I have never started a village pump discussion and I wonder how would this work. However, I do believe such a policy would greatly promote the process of editing and cut down frivolous votes. This proposal may also be beneficial to the whole Wikipedia society and is not particularly for Taiwan-related topics. Any comment would be greatly appreciated.
Reference(incompleted, please kindly help me compile the lists)
Mababa 23:55, 8 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Mababa, this is your best suggestion since turning Chihiro's parents into pigs! I would support this whole-heartedly. It's a waste of effort to flame in talk pages over the same repeated issue when that energy could be put into creating content. What's worse, is how often I see new facts being used to flame - facts that would be useful in the article but aren't because the focus of the editor is on "winning" the debate in the talk page, not improving the article.
When this happens across dozens of pages, with the same arguments, what a waste.
I haven't thought this through, but some considerations of a mixture of these maybe?
This kind of policy is increasingly necessary as the project scales. I wonder if there are statistics about casual editor turnover, but my guess is that for many it's 6 months to a year. So not only do we need something that prevents a single user from repeating a poll until she wins - we also need something that promotes article stability over the most controversial pieces of it from a new user re-proposing an issue that was recently decided. SchmuckyTheCat 03:07, 9 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Thanks for the encouraging comments. Certainly, I am awared the difference between a poll and a trial but I do feel that these votes are just as tiring as getting through trials. For sure we want the content of this encyclopedia to be as accurate as possible. However, I would like to quibble that it is not accurate to say a poll cost people nothing. It still cost the participants who care about the dispute their time and energy to engage into the discussion, to search for informations to bolster their position. And I belive these are the cost for votes. Though these were only polls in wikipedia, I feel the Taiwan-related articles are repetitively being polled or trialed for the very same arguement. Polls are great to gauge opinions in the community; and everyone should enjoy the right to exert freedom to initiate polls. However, it should not be abused. Having the same articles to be voted over and over again based on same reason is a waste of the Wiki resource and keeps participants away from their editting. It is not appropriated and should be stopped.
If the information is inaccurate as you suggested then the majority in the vote should have already voted for the more accurate side based on the information provided by both side. (The biggest problem of today is that we are talking about are opinions, not about the facts.) If the information is POVed, then the majority in the vote should have already voted for the more neutral side. If the result of the vote turned out to be against the so-called naming convention policy, it only indicates that the convention policy is problematic and not necessarily has included all aspects of different views. What would repetitive votes change the neutrality status of the previous vote result in the public eye? I wonder.
I also wonder why's that the result of previous poll was not respected and could be disregarded to initiate a second vote on the very same topic based on the very same reasoning logic whih has been either accepted or rejected in the previous poll?
As I proposed earlier, I suggest a limited protection period from this type of frivolous votes. I also propose this protection could be overidded if a consensus is gathered to safegaurd Wikipedian's right to initiate votes and to circumvent a potential flaw generated from the previous vote. As SchmuckyTheCat suggested, either time period or a poll on the reinitiation would be some options that we could think of. Without a general consensus, everyone should accept and respect the voting result before any new or major evidence/event be presented/changed.
Take today's votes as examples, they are initiated because the previous ones failed to be passed. If today's votes fail again, can one still wage the same votes based on the same reason over an over again every single month until they get passed? Or perhaps if today's votes should passed, can we initiate counter votes over and over again until the result get reverted? As you suggested earlier, since not everyone would participate a vote and also that people's patience weans, would the vote being held later be more accurate than the previous one? So should we keep on engaging everyone's time and energy whole year round until one side is tired, since wikipedia regard participants' time as free and costless? Facts should be always updated, but the consensus generated by each opinion polls should be treasureed and can not be afforded to be disregarded.
BTW, if the name of this proposed policy is inaccurate to descibe the intention of this proposed policy, res judicata policy on voting might be a better name as Toytoy suggested.-- Mababa 03:33, 9 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Forming policies in light of this issue aside, it does seem to me, that in the above instance, a revote is constantly made on the basis that "voters are misguided", that "votes dont count because they dont agree to previous concensus" and that kind of thing. This will not do. I have seen some of these voters sticking to their positions even when the same wikipedian tried to explain the situation to them in their individual talk pages. Does this actually mean the original convention should be the one now coming under review instead? If subsequent change requests gets voted down despite these "conventions", surely it means something has to be done about the conventions themselves?
Nontheless, I agree a limit has to be set to guard against repeated votes, especially useful in cases whereby the vote margin is simply too small, and in which I am pretty sure some folks will initiate a new round of votes...and the process repeats itself again and again so long that the margin remains small. Perhaps we should simply remind ourselves that Wikipedia is not a democracy|. Majority votes dont always count. It is the arguments made which are more important sometimes.-- Huaiwei 09:30, 9 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Although I do appreciate that this topic has been brought up, is it really a problem that a policy needs to be set concerning it? Other than the ROC/Taiwan + China issues, has this been a problem elsewhere? In the aforementioned case, it looks as if the current situation has arisen due to a large amount of misunderstanding, and it looks like it will soon go through arbitration to sort out all the details. If it's not really a problem elsewhere on the site, policy is probably not necessary. Perhaps some general guidelines will be enough. Maurreen's "Give it a rest" sounds like a good idea. -- Umofomia 02:26, 14 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Would someone please explain to me to me the official policy on the inclusion of very non-notable items in the Wikipedia? I'll give you two examples, Pencil Case and Cleat.
Both pencil cases and cleats are entirely mundane, non-notable items. There is so very little that can be said about either. Cleat is currently on VFD at Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Cleat and it appears that it will survive. Never mind the fact that it is a collection of dictionary definitions and has already been transwikied to Wikitionary.
Here's what I'm wondering: is the threshold for inclusion in the Wikipedia set at being a noun? If that is the case and we are going to have articles for all mundane things like Fingernail clippers and door knobs then why do people, books, elementary schools, albumns, etc. require notability?
Just wondering aloud. Kevin Rector 20:54, Mar 25, 2005 (UTC)
This discussion would not be complete without a mention of bread clip, which has been on Wikipedia:Unusual articles for quite some time. I can find absolutely no reason why this article on an "entirely mundane, non-notable item" should not exist. Wiki is not paper, and concerns of notability will never leave the realm of personal opinion—in my opinion. :-) Worry about verifiability instead. JRM 20:19, 2005 Mar 27 (UTC)
I find it very easy to believe that someone could write a wonderful article on Radiator grills, quite separately from that on Radiators. The article on (internal-combustion) radiators would talk about thermal properties, coolant flow, air flow, materials, etc.; the article on radiator grills would talk about their aesthetic development as part of automobile design, their materials (chrome etc.), their effects on pedestrians in accidents, etc. However, just because someone could write such an article does not mean that someone has. I don't see much point in having stubs around which aren't encyclopedic while we're waiting for a John McPhee to come around and make them so. By the way, there is a tradition of beautiful decorated pen/ pencil cases both in Turkey (kalemtraş) and in Japan (enpitsu ire). -- Macrakis 23:16, 28 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Portable soup is an example of a mundane object with an interesting history that survived a deletion vote after being improved. Including these things is in line with the modern trend of Social history.-- Samuel J. Howard 06:33, Apr 8, 2005 (UTC)
The frequent debates and controversy over the question of what criteria - other than neutrality, verifiability and well-formed prose - information included in Wikipedia should fulfil, is at once a bone of contention and also an (often unconcious) attempt by the community to form a consensus. Although the intention may be good, and the interests of all concerned be noble, there are always pitfalls on the path to consensus and here are some that we have fallen pray to in our combined theorising efforts:
Unfortunately, the two pitfalls are linked, and each only strengthens the other. A concious effort to avoid both must be made, and constant effort maintained to prevent falling prey same pitfalls later on the path. This is difficult to do without a first step being made, if only to point out a vague direction to the analysis. I will attempt one below, but beg you to bear in mind that this is only a first tentative step towards an destination unknown, and that only those theoretical constructs which help the analysis need be kept.
Wikipedia has a reasonably clear, though variably stated deontology. We are here to do something we call agree is a good cause. Some state this cause as narrowly (without qualification) as "Building an encyclopedia", whereas others (like our founder) have used a more poetic phrasing: "We are here make the sum of human knowledge available to the world." It is almost universally agreed, even further, that this is a task - like govermnent - without an end. In order to achieve great things, one must always strive for the impossible, thus never reaching a point where one can give up. This concept is called Eventualism, and informs a large field of Wikipedia's philosophy. This does not of course preclude milestones, such as the creation of Wikipedia 1.0, but only admits that we will never finish the task of chronicaling all knowledge. We have inherited a stewardship that can be traced back to the Library of Alexandria and will no doubt continue past Wikipedia - at least in its current form.
This does not, of course, mean that there are not rules can be made concerning how knowledge about the world is to be contained in Wikipedia. As is often pointed out, we are not a repository: there will never be articles which contain information formated in a manner that doesn't conform to our well-developed stylistic guidelines. Let me tabulate some of these almost universally agreed upon rules of our formating of the world's knowledge:
Editorial value plays a huge roll in all the stages of this process. At the first stage, is when people find something interesting that they then progress through the other stages with. We achive this by compressing our content: Through portals like the Main Pages, WikiPortals, disambiguation pages, and even the main articles on large scoped subjects, which compress content by summarising it and linking to sub-articles, we make judgement calls to provide summaries and pointers to important sections of our knowledge content. While this is not necessarily subjective, it is based on a complex analysis of the utility of various parts of the wide knowledge content to different people.
Thus due to its complexity, psychology and experience are again prone (by the pitfalls explained about) to informing these decisions instead of objective shared premises. One person may be convinced of the utility of knowing about a high-school, or a band's album, or a particular character in a computer game, while another person may consider these trivial, in comparison to a historical constitution of a particular nation, or a mathematical formula - and vice versa. In the future, this will not be a problem, as developments in technology (such as the mediawiki software, or a future platform) will allow complete customisation of Wikipedia - the Knowledge value will be seperated from the Editorial value as open access and a (perhaps) meta-tagging/folksonomy-informed system will take the intelligence of stage 3 to a new level. (I digress, ask me about this if you are interested, I have a lot of pretty well-formed ideas)
However, the problems of editorial value where there is only one centralised and thus necessarily agreed upon article schema, can still be theorised upon until this new system is in place. I hope that editorial value will be a field of theory that Wikipedians will perform a lot of work in, thus contributing greatly to society in yet another way.
I will now use the above theory to come to a tentative conclusion regarding inclusion. This conclusion is based on the following (hopefully) shared premises:
Therefore, I conclude that: Until the freedom and open-ness of our content is high enough for the free creation of 'Wikipedia content' portals, and our own article schema(s) become[s] lost in the plethora of schemas, the editorial value of our schema is vital to Wikipedia's mission. However, the question is not of making some way to slice up the sum of human knowledge into two subjective sets (notable and non-notable), but of how best to describe (see above theory) and arrange (the article schema) all knowledge.
I hope that this theorising will be of use to as many Wikipedians as possible, and must apologise that it was written extempore in a public library. Please correct my spelling, grammar and phrasing if you feel bold enough, and please, please, please feel free to use this as a base for further theorising. Together we can ellucidate this problem, and by doing so remove one of the biggest sources of conflict between well-meaning Wikipedians. Also, if anyone found this useful, and is able to, they should register for [wikimania.wikimedia.org | Wikimania 2005], where I will (unless something comes up) be presenting a paper and speech on this and other aspects of Wikipedia theory. -nsh 11:12, 9 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Look, I'm not a dumb guy, but just to take one bolded sentence—"Until the freedom and open-ness of our content is high enough for the free creation of 'Wikipedia content' portals, and our own article schema(s) become[s] lost in the plethora of schemas, the editorial value of our schema is vital to Wikipedia's mission. However, the question is not of making some way to slice up the sum of human knowledge into two subjective sets (notable and non-notable), but of how best to describe (see above theory) and arrange (the article schema) all knowledge.":
Not that I really want answers to these specific questions, I'm just pointing out at slightly greater length why I have no intention of slogging through this. And I'll ask again: Could someone summarize the above? -- Jmabel | Talk 03:17, Apr 11, 2005 (UTC)
As I understand it, nsh would like us to identify notable and non-notable information (instead of deleting that which is non-notable), so that a reader can "view" content on this basis: it's moderated, in other words. Though I would guess he would like different scales of moderation honored, so, for example, you could choose which criteria for "notability" you'd be using when you view Wikipedia.
Also, he's possibly thinking of a wider effect of shared sets of standards--an effect deeper than inclusion/exclusion of individual articles or sections on the basis of notability. So, for example, if I'm a "lumper," then I could merge articles together, while a "splitter" breaks them apart. When viewing, I could choose to view the "lumpy" or "splitty" versions, because the editors and I are agreeing on a shared standard for those things: a standard on which universal, or near-universal, agreement, would not be required.
Demi T/ C 11:58, 2005 Apr 12 (UTC)
My 2 cents: taking the long view...thinking of Wikipedia in say 15 or 20 years, many articles viewed as mundane today will surely be developed into detailed, useful, and relevant entries. The analogy that works for me is that these articles are seeds that need to be planted to grow. Sure, some of the articles will be dull as all heck, but the ones that grow up into wonderful and rich content will make it worth it. Tobycat 00:38, 18 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Some WikiProjects are said by some users to be inappropriate (possibly because of POV-pushing, or being a personal attack magnet). Is it possible for a WikiProject to be inappropriate? If so, what are the criteria, and how do we decide? What should we do with said projects?
Please join the discussion on Wikipedia:Wikiproject/Inappropriate projects.
Radiant _* 11:01, Apr 13, 2005 (UTC)
Please see my proposal at Wikipedia talk:Three-revert rule#Proposed modification. Don't consider it final by any means. Instead suggest possible modifications. -- brian0918 ™ 01:47, 13 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I and several other users have endured the troublesome attitude of a certain user. S/he uploads copyrighted material and makes sweeping changes across the Wikipedia:WikiProject Arcade games articles without a concensus from other participants in the project. Other participants have gone through and reverted his changes, but he usually just goes back and reverts them back to his version. We've tried to reason with him, but he continues to make unpopular changes and reverted to his preference. Since we've already tried to reason with him without any success, what can be done to ban him? He's really just causing more work for the rest of us. — Frecklefoot | Talk 17:20, Apr 12, 2005 (UTC)
Hello everyone. This is not a finished proposal, but rather a "discussion point"
The proposition is to have a Wikipedia board of directors, elected every year, in charge of daily operations. This would not replace the arbitration commitee in tasks of personal disputes or the administrators in their daily tasks.
It would rather be an efficient and fast way to deal with
(Next section highly speculative) The J.Wales and the Wikimedia foundation could have the powers of
All other matters would be done by the board independently. No direct influence (beyond those mentioned above) should be exerted by the foundation or J.Wales.
The board would meet every 2 weeks on a fixed day, discussing the current proposals and events and voting on them.
In order to bring a proposal to the board, it must get a minimal number of "support votes" on some lower proposals board. Discussions/votes would be open to the community to read afterwoods.
The board could have "officers" responsible for specific tasks s.a. public relations, communication with other languages, "technologist" etc.
Certainly, this would be anti-cabal, but those most involved would have the best chances to get elected. It would just be more transparent. It could be a "meritocracy".
-- 85.74.160.136 16:18, 12 Apr 2005 (UTC) (Anon: this is just a proposal; all details negotiable.) See also Debian proj. - Gnome - Apache - PG apparently needs not much admin
PS: Maybe the name "editorial board" would do too or "executive board"
I have removed the fictional events sections from the year articles in the immediate future (up to 2020). These articles are widely linked to, and viewed, and I do not think having events from Robotech etc. really helps our credibility very much. If someone wants to create 2009 in fiction etc. feel free, but I do not think this kind of information should be in the relevent year articles. Rje 15:48, Apr 11, 2005 (UTC)
This comment originally appeared in
Wikipedia:Village pump (policy) 10:54, 2005 Apr 7 (UTC). It was not only removed from the Pump, but from the Pump's history itself -- pure
Orwellian censorship, and not by a common user, either.
If you think this is unacceptable, I hope you will work to preserve not only these remarks, but to discover the actor who obliterated them. —
Xiong
talk 03:13, 2005 Apr 10 (UTC)
I'm striking my accusations of this complaint being "disappeared". I am not convinced! It is just as easy to make me look foolish by altering history as to eliminate all reference to the complaint. But perhaps I misfiled it -- just because Somebody's out to get you doesn't mean you're not paranoid -- in any case, as usual, one act of ill will cloaks another. I only wish Someone would address the substantive issues. — Xiong talk 06:18, 2005 Apr 10 (UTC)
Please answer my complaint here.
Hey all, I probably should've posted here sooner, but I've done some research recently and collected authoritative evidence that, in fact, it is not possible in the U.S. or U.K. for a person to release their own work into the public domain. This creates some potentially dangerous legal situations. I've explained all the details on Wikipedia:You can't grant your work into the public domain, along with what I believe should be done about it. In short, I'm proposing to deprecate some of the public domain image and text contribution tags, and asking contributors who used these tags to use "free use" tags such as {{ CopyrightedFreeUse}} wherever possible instead. You might suggest just modifying the public domain tags, but this isn't okay; it would be effectively releasing someone else's rights without their permission (regardless of intent).
I posted about this on Wikipedia talk: Image copyright tags, Template talk: PD-self, and Template talk: PD-user a number of days ago, seeking consensus on the matter, and there was no objection. I posted at Template talk: MultiLicensePD and some others today, hoping to move forward on these after a suitable period.
I've already added suitable warnings to {{ PD-release}}, {{ PD-self}}, {{ PD-user}}, and {{ PD-link}}. I'm beginning to think some heavy machinery (bots) will be necessary to notify everyone who has used these tags. Although this action is rather drastic, I hope we can mostly agree that it needs to be done. If someone can bring in a professional lawyer I would really like to hear what they have to say on the matter, as I am not one. Deco 02:17, 9 Apr 2005 (UTC)
You technically "grant" anything in the public domain if you forfeit the right to copyright the text. It just means that such a decision is non-reversible. Basically, you give up the right to profit, own, etc off whatever you "claim" to release into the public domain. -- AllyUnion (talk) 08:30, 9 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I totally agree. There's no discernable difference. Wikipedia clearly states what happens if you label your image PD. I don't think for a second these templates should be replaced. The few days this has been posted isn't nearly enough to gain consensus about such a drastic change. Don't rush and certainly don't delete images yet. It's irreversible. Mgm| (talk) 08:46, Apr 9, 2005 (UTC)
For Wikipedia at least, it doesn't much matter because in addition to tagging, the uploader agrees that "I affirm that the copyright holder of this file agrees to license it under the terms of the Wikipedia copyright." If under some interpretation public domain doesn't do it to it, GFDL is still there as a fallback. -- iMb~ Meow 09:48, 9 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I disagree in the strongest possible terms with this deprecation of PD tags/licensing. I am one of the people who dual liscences my text into the public domain (and a couple of photos as well, but they are the minority). What I am saying by doing this is that I give everybody the right to do whatever they want with it, and that by doing so I explicitly forfeit (sp?) all rights over the work. Even if it is technically not legally possible to do that, there is absolutely no lawyer or court in the UK that will challenge a person's de facto right to do this, or who will attempt to enforce copyright on something that somebody has so released.
Although I am no lawyer, I do know that in common law juristictions like the UK and US, case law is equally as important as statute laws (if this is the correct term), and I would be suprised if there wasn't case law that effectively says that people can release things into the public domain.
From
Public domain: A copyright holder can explicitly disclaim any proprietary interest in the work, effectively granting it to the public domain, by providing a licence to this effect. A suitable licence will grant permission for all of the acts which are restricted by copyright law. Such a license is sometimes called a free use or public-domain equivalent licence.
From
Wikipedia:Copyright FAQ#Public_domain: A work which is not copyrighted is in the public domain, and may be freely copied by anyone. It may have been placed in the public domain by its creator, it may be ineligible for copyright (not original enough or otherwise excluded), or the copyright may have expired. (my emphasis).
Sure you can. I hereby release this edit into the Public Domain -- Alterego 20:55, Apr 9, 2005 (UTC)
I believe that Deco is correct. At least one copyright attorney I've spoken with (on non-Wikipedia matters) has said that there is, in the U.S., no provision in the law for an author to disclaim copyright or deliberately make a work public domain. If you take a look at Creative Common's "public domain" license, it is in effect a contractual agreement that attempts to do the same thing. As a result, Deco's conclusion that true public domain works (where the copyright has expired, or where the work was published without a copyright notice before the law was changed to no longer require such a notice) should perhaps be seperated from recently contributed works where the author's intent is to license without limitation.
As for what the implications are for Wikipedia in particular, I have no idea, because I'm not a lawyer. The Uninvited Co., Inc. 15:09, 10 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I had previously attempted to create redirects from presidential nicknames Smirking Chimp, Commander Codpiece, and Whistle Ass to George W. Bush. All of these are notable nicknames with thousands of Google hits. The Wikipedia:Redirect page specifically states: "For example, redirecting Dubya to George W. Bush might be considered offensive, but the redirect aids accidental linking, makes the creation of duplicate articles less likely, and is useful to some people, so it should not be deleted." Furthermore, we currently redirect Slick Willy (another nickname often considered offensive) to Bill Clinton, so I don't see why this should be any different. These redirects were deleted by User:Danny and User:SlimVirgin in what I believe is an abuse of administrative power. At no point were they ever listed on Wikipedia:Redirects for deletion. They were simply deleted summarily. Furthermore, I was blocked for 24 hours by User:Danny with no explanation nor warning. None of this is acceptable. If these users feel that a redirect is unacceptable, they should go through procedure just like everyone else. It isn't acceptable for them to use their admin powers to delete whatever they don't like. 63.173.114.137 23:17, 8 Apr 2005 (UTC)
An interesting situation is developing with the article Adscam blog disclosure. The article discusses how an American blog is reporting information on a Canadian criminal case in contradiction to Canadian law.
In Canada, where press freedoms are somewhat more limited than in the U.S., a judge can issue a "publication ban," prohibiting media from reporting certain details about a case. In the case at issue, the proceedings are public but subject to a publication ban. That means I can go watch them, but I cannot go on the radio and say what I saw. (I don't know about yelling really loud on the street.)
The article on the case itself, sponsorship scandal, carries a warning telling Canadians that editing or linking to the article could put them in legal jeopardy.
The Adscam blog disclosure article carries no such warning. But earlier today, the user Denelson83 took it upon himself or herself to edit the article. He or she cut details from the article and replaced them with the line, "As of that date, such information is covered by a publication ban, and as such, cannot be mentioned here." The user also deleted the link to the blog in question.
I am reverting the edits. Wikipedia is not, as far as I know, based in Canada, and therefore can, like Captain Ed's blog, publish whatever it wants about the case. (I do not live in Canada.)
I think it might be worthwhile to develop a policy on such matters to avoid edit wars. Mwalcoff 21:52, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC)
China doesn't want us reporting that the United States recognizes Taiwan as an independent nation. Should we delete all references to that? Canadian law doesn't apply to servers in the US, and we have no need to care. Rick K 05:58, Apr 7, 2005 (UTC)
So, maybe I'm in the wrong here, but I don't think so. Whenever I come across two or more dab pages because of mixed case (or helpful misspellings) I merge them and make sure the other is correctly redirected. There are two policy docs that seem to make this pretty clear on Wikipedia:Disambiguation it uses the example to share one page "TITLE and Title". Wikipedia:Disambiguation_and_abbreviations is even clearer, "Usually, there should be just one page for all cases (upper- or lower-case), e.g. MB for MB, mB, mb, Mb."
However, I commonly run into editors who revert these mergers because "these are different from those!". and thus, there are three dab pages, one with chemicals (mixed case), one with Titles (Leading cap) and one with abbreviations (ALL CAPS). My most notable failures to merge recently have been Sar/ SAR and Tea (disambiguation)/ TEA (disambiguation). No content on either page, just dab links.
Am I being dense, or is there a legitimate reason to inconvenience readers with seperate dab pages for mixed case? SchmuckyTheCat 15:28, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I agree with SchmuckyTheCat. There shouldn't be two disambiguation pages that differ only in capitals (or in punctuation or pluralization), for the following reasons:
Gdr 16:56, 2005 Apr 6 (UTC)
I want to use extracts from Wiki in online tests assessing students' English proficiency. Our online system generates random test forms from a large item bank. All candidates get different questions and only see the extracts for the brief moment that they are answering the question. It is not practical to provide links back to Wikipedia directly from the extracts because the candidates are not allowed to surf the Web during a test for obvious reasons. Would it meet the requirements of the license to explain on all candidates' home pages that extracts used in our questions come from Wikipedia, and tag the extracts with a Wiki label in the same way that an extract taken from Reuters would simply be tagged 'Reuters'? If not, can you suggest a better way?
Gleavd 06:53, 8 Apr 2005 (UTC)
There are missing images on the Main Page and elsewhere. Have they been removed because of copyright issues, or is it just a technical futz? Lee M 16:05, 13 May 2005 (UTC)
Listen fuckers, I'm tired of all the anonymous accounts who come here and vandalize, obviously with no intention of being a useful contributor. I think people without accounts should get one warning, and if they fuck up again, permanent ban. A zero tolerance policy toward vandalism would cut back on so much work. So I think that blocked users should have a page to go to that they would be able to edit, to plead their case. For instance, my account was hijacked, and I had no way to explain myself in a way that would actually accomplish something. So, under this policy, I would be able to explain what happened to admins, and they would check my contribs, and reverse the block. Problem solved! It keeps the vandals out, and the wrongly accused in. It sure would be better than the anarchy we have now. So, I'm going to create that page now, and link to it. Please go to Blocked User Page for details on this proposal
On Wikipedia talk:Semi-policy I argue that the concept is redundant and the name misleading. Comments welcome. Zocky 18:55, 12 May 2005 (UTC)
I created a new article Wikipedia:POV fork. If you think that this new article is a form of instruction creep then just redirect it. Andries 08:51, 12 May 2005 (UTC)
This is a survey about whether biography articles should start with "Her Majesty", "His Holiness", and such. For everybody who has an opinion on this matter, here's a chance to speak your mind. Zocky 15:39, 11 May 2005 (UTC)
Should people be held responsible if they create a secondary account with the sole purpose of disruption or harrassment? Because that happens more often than you might think. Please see the examples, and give your opinion at Wikipedia:Sock puppet/Proposal.
I am opening the proposed Block on demand amendment to the Blocking policy up for discussion. Please add your thoughts on the Advantages and Disadvantages of this plan. The gist of it is that admins would be allowed to block a user for a limited period of time on that user's request. Given the frequency with which admins themselves seek to block themselves, this is not as silly an idea as I think it may sound at first. Thank you. 24.54.208.177 23:42, 10 May 2005 (UTC)
Hello,
I'm relatively new to Wikipedia, so please forgive me if I'm stepping on well-trodden ground. However, I have a comment regarding the main page. I think we should tinker with the "Did You Know" section that features new articles. Most of the time, the facts in the section are not that interesting. I think the point of any "Did You Know" feature is to provide interesting information -- more specifically, surprising information. (That's how the popular "Did You Know" segment of ESPN SportsCenter works, for example.)
Any new article at this point is likely to be something quite obscure (such as the first mayor of San Jose) and, therefore, quite unlikely to be surprising. (If the first mayor of San Jose was a transvestite or something, that would be surprising.)
I suggest that we keep Did You Know, but don't use it specifically to feature new articles. Instead, Did You Know would be used to point out interesting facts from any articles, new or existing. For example:
Did You Know... that even though the Legislative Council of New Zealand was abolished in 1951, its former chamber is still used for the speech from the throne, since a sovereign cannot enter an elected house?
...that in an average day, 100 billion to 10 trillion e. coli bacteria pass out of your body?
As for new articles, we should still feature selected ones on the front page, perhaps with a list like the following:
New Articles:
Just a suggestion. -- Mwalcoff 20:52, 10 May 2005 (UTC)
I just reverted User talk:64.12.117.13, which 64.12.117.13 (an AOL user) had blanked. The previous content included numerous warnings about vandalism along with a {{sharedip}} template. I know many users with Wikipedia accounts edit their respective Talk pages as they see fit. But is an anonymous editor "allowed" to do this? Seeing how the comments on the talk page might apply to numerous people, I don't believe one of the users should blank the entire page just because s/he doesn't like the criticism. So on the other side of the coin, am I "allowed" to revert someone else's talk page? FWIW I'm seeing different AOL "User talk:" pages being blanked by other AOL addresses (i.e. the IP of the edit doesn't match the IP of the Talk page). I'm guessing this is someone who has left quite a trail of destruction and is somehow catching up with, and then deleting, the various comments left for him or her. The fact that I had this page on my watch list means that I was keeping an eye on him or her at some point, for some reason. -- Gyrofrog (talk) 04:33, 9 May 2005 (UTC)
There have been some recent comments in Arbitration regarding the lack of any meaningful mediation going on and that cases that do go to mediation seem to be abandoned or loiter there without any attention. After discussion with a lot of people it appeared to me that this was the time for a new proposal on overhauling mediation. We've unveiled such a proposal at Wikipedia:Mediation (2005).
Inter did a good part of the initial work on this but I added the informal mediation portion which I think is a key part of the proposal. I have the proposal up and active but it is very much under construction. Comments are encouraged!! -- Wgfinley 02:05, 9 May 2005 (UTC)
For the last few days, there's been an extensive discussion about the suitability of Usenet as a citeable or reliable source for articles on Wikipedia at Wikipedia-EN. As a result one of the participants has added his opinion on the matter at WP:NOR -- & another has now removed as I write this. Because this page is marked as Official Policy, I invite people to enter into the discussion there -- before the matter sinks into Yet Another Edit War. -- llywrch 19:18, 8 May 2005 (UTC)
In these weeks pt.wikipedia has made over than 4.000 articles using a simple tool that has created articles with one or two lines and this only to climb the hit of wikipedias (but this expedient is used also by others).
In Italy, otherwise, we are working hard because we have charge about unreliability of articles in wikipedia from other media's network and we cannot use these self-defeating means.
IMHO I think that the current rules about the results of wikipedias are not favourable to quality and these standards should be revised to support quality and not good classification. -- Ilario 11:50, 8 May 2005 (UTC)
It seems to me that W. is working (to accumulate useful, informative articles), because of the now-cliched effect that given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow. The fact that anyone can edit and deface pages is countered by the fact that many contributors watch the pages they have contributed to, so that pages susceptible to vandalism are also susceptible to anti-vandalism. The vandals that attack anything attached to the front page are thwarted because people notice things that are on the front page.
The problem is that, as time goes on, the original community associated with each page will decay -- this is part of any open contribution project. In open source programming projects, one often sees whole modules languish when the part of the team with expertise in that module all move on to other things.
That is a long-term (though perhaps not yet immediate) problem with Wikipedia and accuracy: obscure pages are much more susceptible to vandalism, precisely because nobody is watching. Furthermore, there's no simple way for a user to know how well the page is being watched.
I suggest keeping track of the number of active contributors watching each page (for some value of 'active' -- perhaps 'has logged in during the past week'), and listing that at the top of the main article, perhaps together with the number of mods in the last week, year, or whatever. That -- or some similar sort of information -- would help give casual users an idea of where W. is most watched (and hence hopefully most reliable).
Since the information is already present on the servers, such a thing would only require modifying the Wikicode, and not the database itself.
I am relatively new here, so it could be that there is some other anti-vandalism measure I'm missing: are all pages watched by a few elite administrators, in addition to the benevolant quasi-anarchy of normal editing?
zowie 18:17, 7 May 2005 (UTC)
The article Adélaïde Labille-Guiard shows dates as follows: (1749-04-11 – 1803-04-24)
Other articles show (in full) day/month/year and, as best as I can see from other biographies, apparently the standard was Month/Day/Year for a very long time. All this is rather confusing (not to mention that the (1749-04-11 – 1803-04-24) system varies from country to country) and it seems to me that consistency in presentation is of importance. What is the actual policy please so that I may dutifully obey? Ted Wilkes
Are there any guidelines on what to link and what not to link when writing an article? Web pages that are full of links are hard to read and distract from the information. An example: I was looking at the definition of quark (soft cheese) - the text linked to Germany and Finland, where I'm pretty sure I won't find any additional information on cheese. Also, I think we can assume that most people reading this article will not be interested in learning what milk or cheese or bacteria are (other 'useless' links).
Can we add a suggestion on the Editing FAQ page, asking people to only link relevant articles?
Hello,
I started a discussion about the Manual of style for numbers, about the possible confusion for non native English speakers between the comma as decimal separator and the comma as separator for groups of three figures.
Cdang| write me 07:42, 4 May 2005 (UTC)
I have created a policy proposal on the use of disclaimer templates. -- cesarb 23:47, 3 May 2005 (UTC)
Before working on the Cal Poly SLO page, I was unfamiliar with the copyright laws and other legal procedures of releasing information. I wanted to improve the article on Cal Poly and I requested permission from the school. Below is the reply I received from the public affairs office stating that they will not allow me to alter any more pages concerning the university. How should I go about this? Other people have already added content to the article. What are the legal technicalities? Someone please advise me on how to go about this dilemma. Thanks.
>While we understand your concern for posting more information about Cal >Poly on Wikipedia, we cannot allow you to alter their site with more or >less information about Cal Poly. We have policies and procedures set up >to handle the dissemination of information to outside sources that >requires specific staff to provide a common data set. We receive a large >number of requests for information about the university and not enough >staff to handle the requests. > >Thank you for your interest and concern for Cal Poly's image. > >Best, >Stacia Momburg >Communications Specialist >Cal Poly Public Affairs >805.756.6260
They're blowing hot air. So long as you're not copying information off their website or any other university publications, they can't control what is said about them. Rick K 21:56, May 3, 2005 (UTC)
I'd like to propose a policy that we often tacitly assume but I think would be helpful to state (unless it actually is policy but I couldn't find it). The idea is that an article should have "one voice", meaning that it should read roughly as though it were written by a single person. In particular, an article should never contradict itself ("but the above is wrong") nor should there be severe stylistic differences between parts of an article. Some of this is mentioned in the Manual of Style. I could see violating this in some special cases, such as using different style for two large independent sections, but I think it's a good guideline. Deco 17:57, 3 May 2005 (UTC)
A few of us have started working on a Manual of Style supplement for disambiguation pages. The Wikipedia:Disambiguation policy has lots of detail on the content of dab pages but says little about the layout. Dab pages are all over the map in terms of layout, and this proposed manual is intended to be a guide to make the pages as useful as possible, keeping them focused on their primary objective of getting users to the page they want easily and quickly. As far as we can tell, there have been no proposals on this topic in the past.
The proposal is at Wikipedia:Disambiguation/Style. Comments on that proposal are welcome on its talk page. — Wahoofive ( talk) 00:09, 3 May 2005 (UTC)
A poll has been set up at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (biographies)/Survey on Style-Prefixed Honorary Titles that may require changes to thousands of articles. I thought the editors should know about it. Gentgeen 21:02, 1 May 2005 (UTC)
More and more bots are on loose. While they eliminate manual work, they in fact create much more manual work for me instead. They interfere with my vandal hunt.
I pay a special attention to modifications made by anonymous users. On my watch list I have pages which I monitor for all edits, but much more are simply pages where I cannot really contribute, but I know enough to recognize vandalism. 95% of vandals are anonymous editors, whose name is just an IP. Therefore I check every edit made by not registered editors. Becase of bot runs I have to check 20 times more articles. And I am not always doing this.
I propose the following solution: make it a policy for bots to report in the edit summary the username of the author of the previous edit.
Still better, the edit summary of the ppevious edit would come handy, and bot's message could be done via link to it, like this: " bot:1026", so that it will take small space. Mikkalai 04:59, 1 May 2005 (UTC)
Does anyone know when Mediawiki 1.5 will be released or what new features it may have? Thanks.
I've been thinking about adding more screen shots to movie and TV show articles (the ones in my DVD collection, at least), and wanted to get some feedback about how much might be too much regarding what we could claim as fair use. Can a good argument be made for adding them when we already have a movie poster or DVD cover image, and how many is too many for an article? Could we justify illustrating several major scenes from a film? Consider this if the screen shots are taken by a digital camera from a large screen TV, rather than DVD rips, so the image quality obviously could not substitute for the original in any way. Postdlf 20:57, 29 Apr 2005 (UTC)
A somewhat related issue I've been thinking about regards images from DVD and other media covers. Do you think it is still justifiable fair use, less, or more so, if only part of the image is used? What if the title and other text is part of what is cropped off, so it no longer functions as a product identifier? I added Image:SMG Buffy season 2.jpg to Sarah Michelle Gellar, and cropped everything but her face, but I'm somewhat uncertain about how this affects the fair use argument. I don't remember reading any case law that would give me a clear answer to this, and I will try to research it more when I have the time, but I wanted to know if this has been discussed before or if anyone has any thoughts. Assume that the image is clearly identified as coming from the original product, both on the image description page and in its captions in any article. Postdlf 21:03, 29 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I couldn't think of any existing titles that I could search for off the bat, but I've been updating the new TheoWiki.com and started to create an article called AEnon. Then I realized that it's really Ænon. Can English titles only take the common 26 letters of the alphabet? I can't find anything that mentions this in Wikipedia Help ( Help:Special_characters, for example). Update: I notice that I can create a title with Æ, but is it the best policy to use the regular alphabet instead? I've also noticed that I can use ! (like Yahoo! in the tile, but haven't looked for any other punctuation in the titles other than a period.
The article Cricket has been turned into a Wikipedia:Wikiportal in the main article namespace. A controversy has arisen about whether or not this is desirable or in line with policies and conventions, and at least one user is opposed to having the article returned to its regular state (which I think is a simple disambiguation page between the insect, sport, and some other miscellany). Please see Talk:Cricket. - Fennec (はさばくのきつね) 23:45, 28 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Since we couldn't get this one resolved on Votes for Undeletion, I'm going to pose the question here. The question is: Does appearing in Who's Who automatically qualify a person for an article in Wikipedia? Your everyday housewife won't be able to get in there, after all. Wiwaxia 22:12, 27 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Let's try to be simple about it: I tend to believe Who's Who is completely worthless for determining notability, having been in a couple myself for no particular reason I can ascertain, so we would need some other way to demonstrate noteworthiness. If the idea is that they get listed in Who's Who because they are noteworthy, then obviously there should be some other way for them to demonstrate that notewortiness without relying on Who's Who. In both cases, Who's Who itself becomes irrelevant and thus should be simply ignored. DreamGuy 05:35, Apr 28, 2005 (UTC)
Please read and contribute to Wikipedia:Userspace policy proposal. There has been recent controversy about what is and is not permissible in user space. It is important to assert which policies (if any) do apply in userspace, and to what extent, and what should be done about transgression. R adiant _* 10:09, Apr 27, 2005 (UTC)
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What's going on with capitalization in bird articles? I thought Wikipedia style was to capitalize only proper names and the first word of an article name; under that assumption I recently moved Barred Owl to Barred owl. But then I got to poking around other articles about birds and discovered a huge number of them have persistent capitalization: look at the names on the List of Oklahoma birds and List of Canadian birds, for example. It's really surprisingly consistent. And in one case at least, there are two different articles distinguished only by capitalization: Barn owl is about the family of Tytonidae, while Barn Owl is about a specific species, Tyto alba. Is there some special policy regarding capitalization in birds' names that I'm unaware of? Should I move Barred owl back to Barred Owl to be consistent? -- Angr/ comhrá 01:03, 15 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Okay, thanks. Dsmdgold has already moved Barred owl back to Barred Owl for me. But I still think it's weird to have Barn owl and Barn Owl be entirely different articles. -- Angr/ comhrá 07:20, 15 Apr 2005 (UTC)
There is an article on here about Star Wars, right. So would I be allowed to post an article about characters or planets from some sort of fan-made thing about Star Wars? Just wanted to know so I don't throw it on and have it knocked back off, I'd prefer it to just never be.
Is there a standard for the size of the criticisms sections in articles on religions, new religious movements, sects, and cults? Most religious movements have documented notable criticisms and vocal ex-member critics in the real world but only some of them have a criticism section here in Wikipedia. Some criticisms even have their own article, like Scientology, Prem Rawat and Sathya Sai Baba. This could be interpreted as unfair.
I am very well aware that this is a highly controversial subject and an almost endless subject of debate among scholars and scientists who study cults. Andries 16:55, 14 Apr 2005 (UTC)
The image about Ugaritic alphabet was taken from a PDF file, provided by Unicode.org. The uploader does mention the source but the first page of that document says: "You may freely use these code charts for personal and internal business uses only. You may not incorporate them either wholly or in part into any product or publication, or otherwise distribute them without express written permission from the Unicode Consortium. However, you may provide links to these charts". In my opinion it does not allow to publish it even under fairuse until the Unicode Consortium allows it and nothing is mentioned about that. What is a general policy about such cases (any place to report it?) and should I mark the image with {{vfd}}?
The discussion as to the appropriateness of using templates or tranclusion as votes (notably in VfD debates), has been moved to Wikipedia talk:Survey guidelines#Voting via templates. Please read and reply there. -- Netoholic @ 14:41, 2005 Apr 14 (UTC)
I'm new, and this may have been discussed before, but would someone please explain to me why so much dubious stuff gets shot out of here to reappear under aliases like lockergnome.com? I tend to wander around the lists, and I have found a dismaying trend where someone thinks a list of something is a good idea, starts it, does little if any research for it, gets bored with it, abandons it, and there it sits. Except it doesn't.
It's one thing to have this kind of stub pretending it's a real boy hanging around here. But they pop up in too many other places on the internet. Just one small but painful example - the List of Egg Dishes. Go look at it. Then go google egg dishes. What is the point here? Why oh why oh why? I do not even dare to check up on where the Wiki "List of cookbooks" may have gone.
Is anyone checking passes at the exit door?
flummoxed, Mothperson 19:48, 12 Apr 2005 (UTC)
moved from WP:AN/I (by User:Dbachmann):
You know, it seems to me (and frankly I'm quite new here) that one reason why a supermajority is required for a "rough consensus" is that there is a huge skew in the sampling. Sure, we can say that 57% of the people who voted support deletion--but that's 57% of what? I'm sure there's a lot of self-selection going in who votes--I don't think anyone can claim it's a fair sampling of "the community." Anyway, I think this error is one reason that hasn't been mentioned in this discussion about why 57% isn't the same as consensus. Demi T/ C 19:34, 2005 Apr 12 (UTC)
While I enjoyed very much the nude picture of Kate Winslet on Titanic (1997 movie), I wonder if it's necessary to show such a screen shot on this page of the encyclopedia. It's rather irresponsible to just leave it there with just a 'spoiler' warning, for any nine year old kid to see it. -- 23:56, 11 Apr 2005 (UTC)
On Wikipedia, we have a lot of material that could be actually shocking from the point of view of a 9-year old. We have graphic photographs and textual descriptions of torture, wars, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and other crimes. For instance, we have a famous image of a little girl burnt by napalm and fleeing naked her destroyed village.
I think that in comparison to all of this, a scene with a pair of blurry tits is really.. tame and not shocking. I also wonder why nobody seriously suggests we bowdlerize history and remove all the very shocking and gory detail, include some details that children may easily relate to, while a little sexy stuff gets heated reaction.
Furthermore, in my experience, young children (elementary school age and below) don't have a prurient interest in naked bodies. This comes later, with the beginnings of puberty. David.Monniaux 08:26, 12 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Of course, a photo of napalmed children is pertinent to the articles it illustrates, while the blurry tits are not. - Nunh-huh 08:29, 12 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Something that is missed in many of these discussions is that while Wikipedia is not censored for minors, the thrust of that guideline has to do with noticing and reverting vandalism and the lack of centralized control over content. It doesn't marry us to avoiding common sense and discretion when deciding how best to treat a subject. Demi T/ C 11:26, 2005 Apr 12 (UTC)
Demi: "If forced to vote...". The image has been nominated for deletion at wp:ifd under yesterday's date. Thryduulf 12:34, 12 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Every article in Wikipedia that doesn’t cite at least one source for the information in the article hurts the credibility of Wikipedia. From my browsing, it appears that most, at least many, of Wikipedia’s articles have this problem. I assume I don’t need to go into how the lack of sources for any article hurts Wikipedia’s credibility, as that is fairly obvious. An, perhaps not so noticeable, effect is that time spent arguing VfD and other issues, would be reduced by a focus on sources over “Importance” etc. and the focus of these discussion should be around verifiability. However, for the purpose of this post, I want to address how Wikipedia can resolve this potential for crisis.
My first proposal is an innovation in the coding for pages to contain tags to identify the integrity rating for the information. Information not sourced is given a 0. Information with a source that hasn’t been checked is 1. A source that has been checked and is still questionable is given a 2. Checked, Accurate and Impeachable sources earn a statement(s) a grade of 3. This way, editors know if a source/statement has been checked. Perhaps color-coded text or background could readily relay the status of the statement as in relation to verifiability. Not only must we ensure that the referenced source exists, but that information attributed to source is actually included in the source.
Second is prevention of unsourced contributions. A better interface to help contributors add footnotes, references and sources would help. Perhaps a prompt for source before new information is added. Find someway to make adding sources easy enough contributors aren’t “put off” by being required to provide citations.
Thirdly, combining the “What’s In; What’s Out”, “What Wikipedia Is Not” and “Importance” is one coherent document based on verifiability as the first level of assessment as opposed to the 5 point system we currently have. (NOTE: I propose keeping the 5-point system as the second level of assessment.)
Finally, I would like to say that I see checking our sources and insisting on the data to verify the information in Wikipedia as being paramount over other tasks we encourage editors to perform, especially deletions. The problem is: source checking isn’t as fun as starting a deletion debate and in fact is real work. Therefore, fact confirmation should be given the same level of division of tasks as other areas: (based on the above 0-3 coding system) such as “find articles without sources”, “verify sources and information”, “review questionable sources.” By implementing the code system, we can auto generate lists of articles with statements coded 0, 1, or 2 to facilitate these lists. Additionally, we should give contributors a chance to revise their articles and include source information before we proceed to the drastic step of deleting articles. AboutWestTulsa 20:32, 10 Apr 2005 (UTC)
A serious question What level our citations are we looking for. Wikipedia is not (as far as I can tell) like a peer reviewed academic journal. Here is an article Lewis B. Schwellenbach. If you don't feel like looking, it is a biography of about nine paragraphs about a guy who held several U. S. government positions in the 1940s. The sources listed are a cover article from TIME magazine from 1945, McCullough's biography of Truman, and the Department of Labor website. Do you want each sentence footnoted? Do you want a citation for the fact that he was born in Superior Wisconsin? He had a minor connection to the Manhattan project, can I just say that it was the secret project to develop the atomic bomb without citing a source for that? The article says that he replaced Francis Perkins as secretary of labor; do you want a citation to show that she was indeed the previous secretary of labor? I realize these sound like silly questions, but if you want to make a policy, I think that we have to draw a bright line.
Many of the articles I work on are biographies of U.S. government officials from (say) 1930 to 1980. Certain common facts come up often, but I don't bother citing (e.g. Johnson became president after Kennedy was killed in November of 1963) because I don't think that tracking down a citation for that would be terribly useful. It sounds to me like you are looking for a redesign of the whole system. Morris 01:34, Apr 11, 2005 (UTC)
Citing sources and references is important. I'd like to see much more of it. I just want to point out that traditional encyclopedias are not particularly punctilious about this either. Encyclopedias are not expected to meet the same standard as scholarly journals. And in traditional encyclopedias It's not always possible even to find the name of an article's author, let alone contact them. For example, Encarta's article about Jack London has no source, and the author is not identifiable. Dpbsmith (talk) 01:58, 11 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I do appreciate everyone's comments. We seem to have gotten a little off the prelim. proposal I started which really only had 3 points. VfD is ONE area where I see that better policy of sources and verifiability may help, but is not the main point from my original post and being is discussed elsewhere. I really wanted to try to spur policy discussions on 1) Creating a SIMPLE system to track fact checking, 2) Make sure any new policy is concisely presented to new users, 3) Reconcile diverging policies on what's in Wikipedia to be centered around verifiability.
In trying to reach consensus, as based on the objections above, I don't think the first element has really been addressed. If someone bothers to check facts, why not record the results on Discussion pages? If we do, why not have a policy/template for how to record fact checking results? The second element is also a must but should incorporate the reconcile part of the third element. As a new user myself, I am telling the community that we need to better prepare new users for contributing to Wikipedia. Trying to get a grasp on the 10 different policy articles about what articles are appropriate for Wikipedia (which sometimes conflict each other) is too confusing, and new contributors are likely to disregard. However, I think if we do reconcile these conflicting documents, then perhaps you are right, we don't have to go too far in making demands for a source for every statement in every article. AboutWestTulsa 16:42, 14 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Recently, articles about Taiwan were under massive votes for changing the titles from XXX of Taiwan to XXX of ROC. Although the initial votes could be justified based on the Naming convention, the results of these votes almost invariably failed to be passed due to the POV nature of the topic and also the lack of a consensus on the issue. However, in the past few days, another round of voting attempting to change the titles of Taiwan-related articles again was waged by the same single Wikipedian and this really affects the pace of many Wikipedians who concerns about this issue and have to make efforts to engage into the same arguement over and over again.
Without suspecting any ulterior intention for this Wikipedian, who I believe to be a truely enthusiastic editor, I believe this tireless efforts targeting on Taiwan-related articles and making other wikipedians have to repetitively engage into the same dispute over and aover again is really problematic. From the previous voting experiences, I believe that the same wikipedian know it very well that such repetitive vote would not only be another futile attempt butl also be irritating to other contributers.
As a general rule, I wonder if we can enact a Double Jeopardy Policy on votes so that once a debate is over, no one should wage another vote based on the very same reason for a certain amount of time, unless a general consensus was gathered from the discussion page. I have never started a village pump discussion and I wonder how would this work. However, I do believe such a policy would greatly promote the process of editing and cut down frivolous votes. This proposal may also be beneficial to the whole Wikipedia society and is not particularly for Taiwan-related topics. Any comment would be greatly appreciated.
Reference(incompleted, please kindly help me compile the lists)
Mababa 23:55, 8 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Mababa, this is your best suggestion since turning Chihiro's parents into pigs! I would support this whole-heartedly. It's a waste of effort to flame in talk pages over the same repeated issue when that energy could be put into creating content. What's worse, is how often I see new facts being used to flame - facts that would be useful in the article but aren't because the focus of the editor is on "winning" the debate in the talk page, not improving the article.
When this happens across dozens of pages, with the same arguments, what a waste.
I haven't thought this through, but some considerations of a mixture of these maybe?
This kind of policy is increasingly necessary as the project scales. I wonder if there are statistics about casual editor turnover, but my guess is that for many it's 6 months to a year. So not only do we need something that prevents a single user from repeating a poll until she wins - we also need something that promotes article stability over the most controversial pieces of it from a new user re-proposing an issue that was recently decided. SchmuckyTheCat 03:07, 9 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Thanks for the encouraging comments. Certainly, I am awared the difference between a poll and a trial but I do feel that these votes are just as tiring as getting through trials. For sure we want the content of this encyclopedia to be as accurate as possible. However, I would like to quibble that it is not accurate to say a poll cost people nothing. It still cost the participants who care about the dispute their time and energy to engage into the discussion, to search for informations to bolster their position. And I belive these are the cost for votes. Though these were only polls in wikipedia, I feel the Taiwan-related articles are repetitively being polled or trialed for the very same arguement. Polls are great to gauge opinions in the community; and everyone should enjoy the right to exert freedom to initiate polls. However, it should not be abused. Having the same articles to be voted over and over again based on same reason is a waste of the Wiki resource and keeps participants away from their editting. It is not appropriated and should be stopped.
If the information is inaccurate as you suggested then the majority in the vote should have already voted for the more accurate side based on the information provided by both side. (The biggest problem of today is that we are talking about are opinions, not about the facts.) If the information is POVed, then the majority in the vote should have already voted for the more neutral side. If the result of the vote turned out to be against the so-called naming convention policy, it only indicates that the convention policy is problematic and not necessarily has included all aspects of different views. What would repetitive votes change the neutrality status of the previous vote result in the public eye? I wonder.
I also wonder why's that the result of previous poll was not respected and could be disregarded to initiate a second vote on the very same topic based on the very same reasoning logic whih has been either accepted or rejected in the previous poll?
As I proposed earlier, I suggest a limited protection period from this type of frivolous votes. I also propose this protection could be overidded if a consensus is gathered to safegaurd Wikipedian's right to initiate votes and to circumvent a potential flaw generated from the previous vote. As SchmuckyTheCat suggested, either time period or a poll on the reinitiation would be some options that we could think of. Without a general consensus, everyone should accept and respect the voting result before any new or major evidence/event be presented/changed.
Take today's votes as examples, they are initiated because the previous ones failed to be passed. If today's votes fail again, can one still wage the same votes based on the same reason over an over again every single month until they get passed? Or perhaps if today's votes should passed, can we initiate counter votes over and over again until the result get reverted? As you suggested earlier, since not everyone would participate a vote and also that people's patience weans, would the vote being held later be more accurate than the previous one? So should we keep on engaging everyone's time and energy whole year round until one side is tired, since wikipedia regard participants' time as free and costless? Facts should be always updated, but the consensus generated by each opinion polls should be treasureed and can not be afforded to be disregarded.
BTW, if the name of this proposed policy is inaccurate to descibe the intention of this proposed policy, res judicata policy on voting might be a better name as Toytoy suggested.-- Mababa 03:33, 9 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Forming policies in light of this issue aside, it does seem to me, that in the above instance, a revote is constantly made on the basis that "voters are misguided", that "votes dont count because they dont agree to previous concensus" and that kind of thing. This will not do. I have seen some of these voters sticking to their positions even when the same wikipedian tried to explain the situation to them in their individual talk pages. Does this actually mean the original convention should be the one now coming under review instead? If subsequent change requests gets voted down despite these "conventions", surely it means something has to be done about the conventions themselves?
Nontheless, I agree a limit has to be set to guard against repeated votes, especially useful in cases whereby the vote margin is simply too small, and in which I am pretty sure some folks will initiate a new round of votes...and the process repeats itself again and again so long that the margin remains small. Perhaps we should simply remind ourselves that Wikipedia is not a democracy|. Majority votes dont always count. It is the arguments made which are more important sometimes.-- Huaiwei 09:30, 9 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Although I do appreciate that this topic has been brought up, is it really a problem that a policy needs to be set concerning it? Other than the ROC/Taiwan + China issues, has this been a problem elsewhere? In the aforementioned case, it looks as if the current situation has arisen due to a large amount of misunderstanding, and it looks like it will soon go through arbitration to sort out all the details. If it's not really a problem elsewhere on the site, policy is probably not necessary. Perhaps some general guidelines will be enough. Maurreen's "Give it a rest" sounds like a good idea. -- Umofomia 02:26, 14 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Would someone please explain to me to me the official policy on the inclusion of very non-notable items in the Wikipedia? I'll give you two examples, Pencil Case and Cleat.
Both pencil cases and cleats are entirely mundane, non-notable items. There is so very little that can be said about either. Cleat is currently on VFD at Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Cleat and it appears that it will survive. Never mind the fact that it is a collection of dictionary definitions and has already been transwikied to Wikitionary.
Here's what I'm wondering: is the threshold for inclusion in the Wikipedia set at being a noun? If that is the case and we are going to have articles for all mundane things like Fingernail clippers and door knobs then why do people, books, elementary schools, albumns, etc. require notability?
Just wondering aloud. Kevin Rector 20:54, Mar 25, 2005 (UTC)
This discussion would not be complete without a mention of bread clip, which has been on Wikipedia:Unusual articles for quite some time. I can find absolutely no reason why this article on an "entirely mundane, non-notable item" should not exist. Wiki is not paper, and concerns of notability will never leave the realm of personal opinion—in my opinion. :-) Worry about verifiability instead. JRM 20:19, 2005 Mar 27 (UTC)
I find it very easy to believe that someone could write a wonderful article on Radiator grills, quite separately from that on Radiators. The article on (internal-combustion) radiators would talk about thermal properties, coolant flow, air flow, materials, etc.; the article on radiator grills would talk about their aesthetic development as part of automobile design, their materials (chrome etc.), their effects on pedestrians in accidents, etc. However, just because someone could write such an article does not mean that someone has. I don't see much point in having stubs around which aren't encyclopedic while we're waiting for a John McPhee to come around and make them so. By the way, there is a tradition of beautiful decorated pen/ pencil cases both in Turkey (kalemtraş) and in Japan (enpitsu ire). -- Macrakis 23:16, 28 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Portable soup is an example of a mundane object with an interesting history that survived a deletion vote after being improved. Including these things is in line with the modern trend of Social history.-- Samuel J. Howard 06:33, Apr 8, 2005 (UTC)
The frequent debates and controversy over the question of what criteria - other than neutrality, verifiability and well-formed prose - information included in Wikipedia should fulfil, is at once a bone of contention and also an (often unconcious) attempt by the community to form a consensus. Although the intention may be good, and the interests of all concerned be noble, there are always pitfalls on the path to consensus and here are some that we have fallen pray to in our combined theorising efforts:
Unfortunately, the two pitfalls are linked, and each only strengthens the other. A concious effort to avoid both must be made, and constant effort maintained to prevent falling prey same pitfalls later on the path. This is difficult to do without a first step being made, if only to point out a vague direction to the analysis. I will attempt one below, but beg you to bear in mind that this is only a first tentative step towards an destination unknown, and that only those theoretical constructs which help the analysis need be kept.
Wikipedia has a reasonably clear, though variably stated deontology. We are here to do something we call agree is a good cause. Some state this cause as narrowly (without qualification) as "Building an encyclopedia", whereas others (like our founder) have used a more poetic phrasing: "We are here make the sum of human knowledge available to the world." It is almost universally agreed, even further, that this is a task - like govermnent - without an end. In order to achieve great things, one must always strive for the impossible, thus never reaching a point where one can give up. This concept is called Eventualism, and informs a large field of Wikipedia's philosophy. This does not of course preclude milestones, such as the creation of Wikipedia 1.0, but only admits that we will never finish the task of chronicaling all knowledge. We have inherited a stewardship that can be traced back to the Library of Alexandria and will no doubt continue past Wikipedia - at least in its current form.
This does not, of course, mean that there are not rules can be made concerning how knowledge about the world is to be contained in Wikipedia. As is often pointed out, we are not a repository: there will never be articles which contain information formated in a manner that doesn't conform to our well-developed stylistic guidelines. Let me tabulate some of these almost universally agreed upon rules of our formating of the world's knowledge:
Editorial value plays a huge roll in all the stages of this process. At the first stage, is when people find something interesting that they then progress through the other stages with. We achive this by compressing our content: Through portals like the Main Pages, WikiPortals, disambiguation pages, and even the main articles on large scoped subjects, which compress content by summarising it and linking to sub-articles, we make judgement calls to provide summaries and pointers to important sections of our knowledge content. While this is not necessarily subjective, it is based on a complex analysis of the utility of various parts of the wide knowledge content to different people.
Thus due to its complexity, psychology and experience are again prone (by the pitfalls explained about) to informing these decisions instead of objective shared premises. One person may be convinced of the utility of knowing about a high-school, or a band's album, or a particular character in a computer game, while another person may consider these trivial, in comparison to a historical constitution of a particular nation, or a mathematical formula - and vice versa. In the future, this will not be a problem, as developments in technology (such as the mediawiki software, or a future platform) will allow complete customisation of Wikipedia - the Knowledge value will be seperated from the Editorial value as open access and a (perhaps) meta-tagging/folksonomy-informed system will take the intelligence of stage 3 to a new level. (I digress, ask me about this if you are interested, I have a lot of pretty well-formed ideas)
However, the problems of editorial value where there is only one centralised and thus necessarily agreed upon article schema, can still be theorised upon until this new system is in place. I hope that editorial value will be a field of theory that Wikipedians will perform a lot of work in, thus contributing greatly to society in yet another way.
I will now use the above theory to come to a tentative conclusion regarding inclusion. This conclusion is based on the following (hopefully) shared premises:
Therefore, I conclude that: Until the freedom and open-ness of our content is high enough for the free creation of 'Wikipedia content' portals, and our own article schema(s) become[s] lost in the plethora of schemas, the editorial value of our schema is vital to Wikipedia's mission. However, the question is not of making some way to slice up the sum of human knowledge into two subjective sets (notable and non-notable), but of how best to describe (see above theory) and arrange (the article schema) all knowledge.
I hope that this theorising will be of use to as many Wikipedians as possible, and must apologise that it was written extempore in a public library. Please correct my spelling, grammar and phrasing if you feel bold enough, and please, please, please feel free to use this as a base for further theorising. Together we can ellucidate this problem, and by doing so remove one of the biggest sources of conflict between well-meaning Wikipedians. Also, if anyone found this useful, and is able to, they should register for [wikimania.wikimedia.org | Wikimania 2005], where I will (unless something comes up) be presenting a paper and speech on this and other aspects of Wikipedia theory. -nsh 11:12, 9 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Look, I'm not a dumb guy, but just to take one bolded sentence—"Until the freedom and open-ness of our content is high enough for the free creation of 'Wikipedia content' portals, and our own article schema(s) become[s] lost in the plethora of schemas, the editorial value of our schema is vital to Wikipedia's mission. However, the question is not of making some way to slice up the sum of human knowledge into two subjective sets (notable and non-notable), but of how best to describe (see above theory) and arrange (the article schema) all knowledge.":
Not that I really want answers to these specific questions, I'm just pointing out at slightly greater length why I have no intention of slogging through this. And I'll ask again: Could someone summarize the above? -- Jmabel | Talk 03:17, Apr 11, 2005 (UTC)
As I understand it, nsh would like us to identify notable and non-notable information (instead of deleting that which is non-notable), so that a reader can "view" content on this basis: it's moderated, in other words. Though I would guess he would like different scales of moderation honored, so, for example, you could choose which criteria for "notability" you'd be using when you view Wikipedia.
Also, he's possibly thinking of a wider effect of shared sets of standards--an effect deeper than inclusion/exclusion of individual articles or sections on the basis of notability. So, for example, if I'm a "lumper," then I could merge articles together, while a "splitter" breaks them apart. When viewing, I could choose to view the "lumpy" or "splitty" versions, because the editors and I are agreeing on a shared standard for those things: a standard on which universal, or near-universal, agreement, would not be required.
Demi T/ C 11:58, 2005 Apr 12 (UTC)
My 2 cents: taking the long view...thinking of Wikipedia in say 15 or 20 years, many articles viewed as mundane today will surely be developed into detailed, useful, and relevant entries. The analogy that works for me is that these articles are seeds that need to be planted to grow. Sure, some of the articles will be dull as all heck, but the ones that grow up into wonderful and rich content will make it worth it. Tobycat 00:38, 18 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Some WikiProjects are said by some users to be inappropriate (possibly because of POV-pushing, or being a personal attack magnet). Is it possible for a WikiProject to be inappropriate? If so, what are the criteria, and how do we decide? What should we do with said projects?
Please join the discussion on Wikipedia:Wikiproject/Inappropriate projects.
Radiant _* 11:01, Apr 13, 2005 (UTC)
Please see my proposal at Wikipedia talk:Three-revert rule#Proposed modification. Don't consider it final by any means. Instead suggest possible modifications. -- brian0918 ™ 01:47, 13 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I and several other users have endured the troublesome attitude of a certain user. S/he uploads copyrighted material and makes sweeping changes across the Wikipedia:WikiProject Arcade games articles without a concensus from other participants in the project. Other participants have gone through and reverted his changes, but he usually just goes back and reverts them back to his version. We've tried to reason with him, but he continues to make unpopular changes and reverted to his preference. Since we've already tried to reason with him without any success, what can be done to ban him? He's really just causing more work for the rest of us. — Frecklefoot | Talk 17:20, Apr 12, 2005 (UTC)
Hello everyone. This is not a finished proposal, but rather a "discussion point"
The proposition is to have a Wikipedia board of directors, elected every year, in charge of daily operations. This would not replace the arbitration commitee in tasks of personal disputes or the administrators in their daily tasks.
It would rather be an efficient and fast way to deal with
(Next section highly speculative) The J.Wales and the Wikimedia foundation could have the powers of
All other matters would be done by the board independently. No direct influence (beyond those mentioned above) should be exerted by the foundation or J.Wales.
The board would meet every 2 weeks on a fixed day, discussing the current proposals and events and voting on them.
In order to bring a proposal to the board, it must get a minimal number of "support votes" on some lower proposals board. Discussions/votes would be open to the community to read afterwoods.
The board could have "officers" responsible for specific tasks s.a. public relations, communication with other languages, "technologist" etc.
Certainly, this would be anti-cabal, but those most involved would have the best chances to get elected. It would just be more transparent. It could be a "meritocracy".
-- 85.74.160.136 16:18, 12 Apr 2005 (UTC) (Anon: this is just a proposal; all details negotiable.) See also Debian proj. - Gnome - Apache - PG apparently needs not much admin
PS: Maybe the name "editorial board" would do too or "executive board"
I have removed the fictional events sections from the year articles in the immediate future (up to 2020). These articles are widely linked to, and viewed, and I do not think having events from Robotech etc. really helps our credibility very much. If someone wants to create 2009 in fiction etc. feel free, but I do not think this kind of information should be in the relevent year articles. Rje 15:48, Apr 11, 2005 (UTC)
This comment originally appeared in
Wikipedia:Village pump (policy) 10:54, 2005 Apr 7 (UTC). It was not only removed from the Pump, but from the Pump's history itself -- pure
Orwellian censorship, and not by a common user, either.
If you think this is unacceptable, I hope you will work to preserve not only these remarks, but to discover the actor who obliterated them. —
Xiong
talk 03:13, 2005 Apr 10 (UTC)
I'm striking my accusations of this complaint being "disappeared". I am not convinced! It is just as easy to make me look foolish by altering history as to eliminate all reference to the complaint. But perhaps I misfiled it -- just because Somebody's out to get you doesn't mean you're not paranoid -- in any case, as usual, one act of ill will cloaks another. I only wish Someone would address the substantive issues. — Xiong talk 06:18, 2005 Apr 10 (UTC)
Please answer my complaint here.
Hey all, I probably should've posted here sooner, but I've done some research recently and collected authoritative evidence that, in fact, it is not possible in the U.S. or U.K. for a person to release their own work into the public domain. This creates some potentially dangerous legal situations. I've explained all the details on Wikipedia:You can't grant your work into the public domain, along with what I believe should be done about it. In short, I'm proposing to deprecate some of the public domain image and text contribution tags, and asking contributors who used these tags to use "free use" tags such as {{ CopyrightedFreeUse}} wherever possible instead. You might suggest just modifying the public domain tags, but this isn't okay; it would be effectively releasing someone else's rights without their permission (regardless of intent).
I posted about this on Wikipedia talk: Image copyright tags, Template talk: PD-self, and Template talk: PD-user a number of days ago, seeking consensus on the matter, and there was no objection. I posted at Template talk: MultiLicensePD and some others today, hoping to move forward on these after a suitable period.
I've already added suitable warnings to {{ PD-release}}, {{ PD-self}}, {{ PD-user}}, and {{ PD-link}}. I'm beginning to think some heavy machinery (bots) will be necessary to notify everyone who has used these tags. Although this action is rather drastic, I hope we can mostly agree that it needs to be done. If someone can bring in a professional lawyer I would really like to hear what they have to say on the matter, as I am not one. Deco 02:17, 9 Apr 2005 (UTC)
You technically "grant" anything in the public domain if you forfeit the right to copyright the text. It just means that such a decision is non-reversible. Basically, you give up the right to profit, own, etc off whatever you "claim" to release into the public domain. -- AllyUnion (talk) 08:30, 9 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I totally agree. There's no discernable difference. Wikipedia clearly states what happens if you label your image PD. I don't think for a second these templates should be replaced. The few days this has been posted isn't nearly enough to gain consensus about such a drastic change. Don't rush and certainly don't delete images yet. It's irreversible. Mgm| (talk) 08:46, Apr 9, 2005 (UTC)
For Wikipedia at least, it doesn't much matter because in addition to tagging, the uploader agrees that "I affirm that the copyright holder of this file agrees to license it under the terms of the Wikipedia copyright." If under some interpretation public domain doesn't do it to it, GFDL is still there as a fallback. -- iMb~ Meow 09:48, 9 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I disagree in the strongest possible terms with this deprecation of PD tags/licensing. I am one of the people who dual liscences my text into the public domain (and a couple of photos as well, but they are the minority). What I am saying by doing this is that I give everybody the right to do whatever they want with it, and that by doing so I explicitly forfeit (sp?) all rights over the work. Even if it is technically not legally possible to do that, there is absolutely no lawyer or court in the UK that will challenge a person's de facto right to do this, or who will attempt to enforce copyright on something that somebody has so released.
Although I am no lawyer, I do know that in common law juristictions like the UK and US, case law is equally as important as statute laws (if this is the correct term), and I would be suprised if there wasn't case law that effectively says that people can release things into the public domain.
From
Public domain: A copyright holder can explicitly disclaim any proprietary interest in the work, effectively granting it to the public domain, by providing a licence to this effect. A suitable licence will grant permission for all of the acts which are restricted by copyright law. Such a license is sometimes called a free use or public-domain equivalent licence.
From
Wikipedia:Copyright FAQ#Public_domain: A work which is not copyrighted is in the public domain, and may be freely copied by anyone. It may have been placed in the public domain by its creator, it may be ineligible for copyright (not original enough or otherwise excluded), or the copyright may have expired. (my emphasis).
Sure you can. I hereby release this edit into the Public Domain -- Alterego 20:55, Apr 9, 2005 (UTC)
I believe that Deco is correct. At least one copyright attorney I've spoken with (on non-Wikipedia matters) has said that there is, in the U.S., no provision in the law for an author to disclaim copyright or deliberately make a work public domain. If you take a look at Creative Common's "public domain" license, it is in effect a contractual agreement that attempts to do the same thing. As a result, Deco's conclusion that true public domain works (where the copyright has expired, or where the work was published without a copyright notice before the law was changed to no longer require such a notice) should perhaps be seperated from recently contributed works where the author's intent is to license without limitation.
As for what the implications are for Wikipedia in particular, I have no idea, because I'm not a lawyer. The Uninvited Co., Inc. 15:09, 10 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I had previously attempted to create redirects from presidential nicknames Smirking Chimp, Commander Codpiece, and Whistle Ass to George W. Bush. All of these are notable nicknames with thousands of Google hits. The Wikipedia:Redirect page specifically states: "For example, redirecting Dubya to George W. Bush might be considered offensive, but the redirect aids accidental linking, makes the creation of duplicate articles less likely, and is useful to some people, so it should not be deleted." Furthermore, we currently redirect Slick Willy (another nickname often considered offensive) to Bill Clinton, so I don't see why this should be any different. These redirects were deleted by User:Danny and User:SlimVirgin in what I believe is an abuse of administrative power. At no point were they ever listed on Wikipedia:Redirects for deletion. They were simply deleted summarily. Furthermore, I was blocked for 24 hours by User:Danny with no explanation nor warning. None of this is acceptable. If these users feel that a redirect is unacceptable, they should go through procedure just like everyone else. It isn't acceptable for them to use their admin powers to delete whatever they don't like. 63.173.114.137 23:17, 8 Apr 2005 (UTC)
An interesting situation is developing with the article Adscam blog disclosure. The article discusses how an American blog is reporting information on a Canadian criminal case in contradiction to Canadian law.
In Canada, where press freedoms are somewhat more limited than in the U.S., a judge can issue a "publication ban," prohibiting media from reporting certain details about a case. In the case at issue, the proceedings are public but subject to a publication ban. That means I can go watch them, but I cannot go on the radio and say what I saw. (I don't know about yelling really loud on the street.)
The article on the case itself, sponsorship scandal, carries a warning telling Canadians that editing or linking to the article could put them in legal jeopardy.
The Adscam blog disclosure article carries no such warning. But earlier today, the user Denelson83 took it upon himself or herself to edit the article. He or she cut details from the article and replaced them with the line, "As of that date, such information is covered by a publication ban, and as such, cannot be mentioned here." The user also deleted the link to the blog in question.
I am reverting the edits. Wikipedia is not, as far as I know, based in Canada, and therefore can, like Captain Ed's blog, publish whatever it wants about the case. (I do not live in Canada.)
I think it might be worthwhile to develop a policy on such matters to avoid edit wars. Mwalcoff 21:52, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC)
China doesn't want us reporting that the United States recognizes Taiwan as an independent nation. Should we delete all references to that? Canadian law doesn't apply to servers in the US, and we have no need to care. Rick K 05:58, Apr 7, 2005 (UTC)
So, maybe I'm in the wrong here, but I don't think so. Whenever I come across two or more dab pages because of mixed case (or helpful misspellings) I merge them and make sure the other is correctly redirected. There are two policy docs that seem to make this pretty clear on Wikipedia:Disambiguation it uses the example to share one page "TITLE and Title". Wikipedia:Disambiguation_and_abbreviations is even clearer, "Usually, there should be just one page for all cases (upper- or lower-case), e.g. MB for MB, mB, mb, Mb."
However, I commonly run into editors who revert these mergers because "these are different from those!". and thus, there are three dab pages, one with chemicals (mixed case), one with Titles (Leading cap) and one with abbreviations (ALL CAPS). My most notable failures to merge recently have been Sar/ SAR and Tea (disambiguation)/ TEA (disambiguation). No content on either page, just dab links.
Am I being dense, or is there a legitimate reason to inconvenience readers with seperate dab pages for mixed case? SchmuckyTheCat 15:28, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I agree with SchmuckyTheCat. There shouldn't be two disambiguation pages that differ only in capitals (or in punctuation or pluralization), for the following reasons:
Gdr 16:56, 2005 Apr 6 (UTC)
I want to use extracts from Wiki in online tests assessing students' English proficiency. Our online system generates random test forms from a large item bank. All candidates get different questions and only see the extracts for the brief moment that they are answering the question. It is not practical to provide links back to Wikipedia directly from the extracts because the candidates are not allowed to surf the Web during a test for obvious reasons. Would it meet the requirements of the license to explain on all candidates' home pages that extracts used in our questions come from Wikipedia, and tag the extracts with a Wiki label in the same way that an extract taken from Reuters would simply be tagged 'Reuters'? If not, can you suggest a better way?
Gleavd 06:53, 8 Apr 2005 (UTC)
There are missing images on the Main Page and elsewhere. Have they been removed because of copyright issues, or is it just a technical futz? Lee M 16:05, 13 May 2005 (UTC)
Listen fuckers, I'm tired of all the anonymous accounts who come here and vandalize, obviously with no intention of being a useful contributor. I think people without accounts should get one warning, and if they fuck up again, permanent ban. A zero tolerance policy toward vandalism would cut back on so much work. So I think that blocked users should have a page to go to that they would be able to edit, to plead their case. For instance, my account was hijacked, and I had no way to explain myself in a way that would actually accomplish something. So, under this policy, I would be able to explain what happened to admins, and they would check my contribs, and reverse the block. Problem solved! It keeps the vandals out, and the wrongly accused in. It sure would be better than the anarchy we have now. So, I'm going to create that page now, and link to it. Please go to Blocked User Page for details on this proposal
On Wikipedia talk:Semi-policy I argue that the concept is redundant and the name misleading. Comments welcome. Zocky 18:55, 12 May 2005 (UTC)
I created a new article Wikipedia:POV fork. If you think that this new article is a form of instruction creep then just redirect it. Andries 08:51, 12 May 2005 (UTC)
This is a survey about whether biography articles should start with "Her Majesty", "His Holiness", and such. For everybody who has an opinion on this matter, here's a chance to speak your mind. Zocky 15:39, 11 May 2005 (UTC)
Should people be held responsible if they create a secondary account with the sole purpose of disruption or harrassment? Because that happens more often than you might think. Please see the examples, and give your opinion at Wikipedia:Sock puppet/Proposal.
I am opening the proposed Block on demand amendment to the Blocking policy up for discussion. Please add your thoughts on the Advantages and Disadvantages of this plan. The gist of it is that admins would be allowed to block a user for a limited period of time on that user's request. Given the frequency with which admins themselves seek to block themselves, this is not as silly an idea as I think it may sound at first. Thank you. 24.54.208.177 23:42, 10 May 2005 (UTC)
Hello,
I'm relatively new to Wikipedia, so please forgive me if I'm stepping on well-trodden ground. However, I have a comment regarding the main page. I think we should tinker with the "Did You Know" section that features new articles. Most of the time, the facts in the section are not that interesting. I think the point of any "Did You Know" feature is to provide interesting information -- more specifically, surprising information. (That's how the popular "Did You Know" segment of ESPN SportsCenter works, for example.)
Any new article at this point is likely to be something quite obscure (such as the first mayor of San Jose) and, therefore, quite unlikely to be surprising. (If the first mayor of San Jose was a transvestite or something, that would be surprising.)
I suggest that we keep Did You Know, but don't use it specifically to feature new articles. Instead, Did You Know would be used to point out interesting facts from any articles, new or existing. For example:
Did You Know... that even though the Legislative Council of New Zealand was abolished in 1951, its former chamber is still used for the speech from the throne, since a sovereign cannot enter an elected house?
...that in an average day, 100 billion to 10 trillion e. coli bacteria pass out of your body?
As for new articles, we should still feature selected ones on the front page, perhaps with a list like the following:
New Articles:
Just a suggestion. -- Mwalcoff 20:52, 10 May 2005 (UTC)
I just reverted User talk:64.12.117.13, which 64.12.117.13 (an AOL user) had blanked. The previous content included numerous warnings about vandalism along with a {{sharedip}} template. I know many users with Wikipedia accounts edit their respective Talk pages as they see fit. But is an anonymous editor "allowed" to do this? Seeing how the comments on the talk page might apply to numerous people, I don't believe one of the users should blank the entire page just because s/he doesn't like the criticism. So on the other side of the coin, am I "allowed" to revert someone else's talk page? FWIW I'm seeing different AOL "User talk:" pages being blanked by other AOL addresses (i.e. the IP of the edit doesn't match the IP of the Talk page). I'm guessing this is someone who has left quite a trail of destruction and is somehow catching up with, and then deleting, the various comments left for him or her. The fact that I had this page on my watch list means that I was keeping an eye on him or her at some point, for some reason. -- Gyrofrog (talk) 04:33, 9 May 2005 (UTC)
There have been some recent comments in Arbitration regarding the lack of any meaningful mediation going on and that cases that do go to mediation seem to be abandoned or loiter there without any attention. After discussion with a lot of people it appeared to me that this was the time for a new proposal on overhauling mediation. We've unveiled such a proposal at Wikipedia:Mediation (2005).
Inter did a good part of the initial work on this but I added the informal mediation portion which I think is a key part of the proposal. I have the proposal up and active but it is very much under construction. Comments are encouraged!! -- Wgfinley 02:05, 9 May 2005 (UTC)
For the last few days, there's been an extensive discussion about the suitability of Usenet as a citeable or reliable source for articles on Wikipedia at Wikipedia-EN. As a result one of the participants has added his opinion on the matter at WP:NOR -- & another has now removed as I write this. Because this page is marked as Official Policy, I invite people to enter into the discussion there -- before the matter sinks into Yet Another Edit War. -- llywrch 19:18, 8 May 2005 (UTC)
In these weeks pt.wikipedia has made over than 4.000 articles using a simple tool that has created articles with one or two lines and this only to climb the hit of wikipedias (but this expedient is used also by others).
In Italy, otherwise, we are working hard because we have charge about unreliability of articles in wikipedia from other media's network and we cannot use these self-defeating means.
IMHO I think that the current rules about the results of wikipedias are not favourable to quality and these standards should be revised to support quality and not good classification. -- Ilario 11:50, 8 May 2005 (UTC)
It seems to me that W. is working (to accumulate useful, informative articles), because of the now-cliched effect that given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow. The fact that anyone can edit and deface pages is countered by the fact that many contributors watch the pages they have contributed to, so that pages susceptible to vandalism are also susceptible to anti-vandalism. The vandals that attack anything attached to the front page are thwarted because people notice things that are on the front page.
The problem is that, as time goes on, the original community associated with each page will decay -- this is part of any open contribution project. In open source programming projects, one often sees whole modules languish when the part of the team with expertise in that module all move on to other things.
That is a long-term (though perhaps not yet immediate) problem with Wikipedia and accuracy: obscure pages are much more susceptible to vandalism, precisely because nobody is watching. Furthermore, there's no simple way for a user to know how well the page is being watched.
I suggest keeping track of the number of active contributors watching each page (for some value of 'active' -- perhaps 'has logged in during the past week'), and listing that at the top of the main article, perhaps together with the number of mods in the last week, year, or whatever. That -- or some similar sort of information -- would help give casual users an idea of where W. is most watched (and hence hopefully most reliable).
Since the information is already present on the servers, such a thing would only require modifying the Wikicode, and not the database itself.
I am relatively new here, so it could be that there is some other anti-vandalism measure I'm missing: are all pages watched by a few elite administrators, in addition to the benevolant quasi-anarchy of normal editing?
zowie 18:17, 7 May 2005 (UTC)
The article Adélaïde Labille-Guiard shows dates as follows: (1749-04-11 – 1803-04-24)
Other articles show (in full) day/month/year and, as best as I can see from other biographies, apparently the standard was Month/Day/Year for a very long time. All this is rather confusing (not to mention that the (1749-04-11 – 1803-04-24) system varies from country to country) and it seems to me that consistency in presentation is of importance. What is the actual policy please so that I may dutifully obey? Ted Wilkes
Are there any guidelines on what to link and what not to link when writing an article? Web pages that are full of links are hard to read and distract from the information. An example: I was looking at the definition of quark (soft cheese) - the text linked to Germany and Finland, where I'm pretty sure I won't find any additional information on cheese. Also, I think we can assume that most people reading this article will not be interested in learning what milk or cheese or bacteria are (other 'useless' links).
Can we add a suggestion on the Editing FAQ page, asking people to only link relevant articles?
Hello,
I started a discussion about the Manual of style for numbers, about the possible confusion for non native English speakers between the comma as decimal separator and the comma as separator for groups of three figures.
Cdang| write me 07:42, 4 May 2005 (UTC)
I have created a policy proposal on the use of disclaimer templates. -- cesarb 23:47, 3 May 2005 (UTC)
Before working on the Cal Poly SLO page, I was unfamiliar with the copyright laws and other legal procedures of releasing information. I wanted to improve the article on Cal Poly and I requested permission from the school. Below is the reply I received from the public affairs office stating that they will not allow me to alter any more pages concerning the university. How should I go about this? Other people have already added content to the article. What are the legal technicalities? Someone please advise me on how to go about this dilemma. Thanks.
>While we understand your concern for posting more information about Cal >Poly on Wikipedia, we cannot allow you to alter their site with more or >less information about Cal Poly. We have policies and procedures set up >to handle the dissemination of information to outside sources that >requires specific staff to provide a common data set. We receive a large >number of requests for information about the university and not enough >staff to handle the requests. > >Thank you for your interest and concern for Cal Poly's image. > >Best, >Stacia Momburg >Communications Specialist >Cal Poly Public Affairs >805.756.6260
They're blowing hot air. So long as you're not copying information off their website or any other university publications, they can't control what is said about them. Rick K 21:56, May 3, 2005 (UTC)
I'd like to propose a policy that we often tacitly assume but I think would be helpful to state (unless it actually is policy but I couldn't find it). The idea is that an article should have "one voice", meaning that it should read roughly as though it were written by a single person. In particular, an article should never contradict itself ("but the above is wrong") nor should there be severe stylistic differences between parts of an article. Some of this is mentioned in the Manual of Style. I could see violating this in some special cases, such as using different style for two large independent sections, but I think it's a good guideline. Deco 17:57, 3 May 2005 (UTC)
A few of us have started working on a Manual of Style supplement for disambiguation pages. The Wikipedia:Disambiguation policy has lots of detail on the content of dab pages but says little about the layout. Dab pages are all over the map in terms of layout, and this proposed manual is intended to be a guide to make the pages as useful as possible, keeping them focused on their primary objective of getting users to the page they want easily and quickly. As far as we can tell, there have been no proposals on this topic in the past.
The proposal is at Wikipedia:Disambiguation/Style. Comments on that proposal are welcome on its talk page. — Wahoofive ( talk) 00:09, 3 May 2005 (UTC)
A poll has been set up at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (biographies)/Survey on Style-Prefixed Honorary Titles that may require changes to thousands of articles. I thought the editors should know about it. Gentgeen 21:02, 1 May 2005 (UTC)
More and more bots are on loose. While they eliminate manual work, they in fact create much more manual work for me instead. They interfere with my vandal hunt.
I pay a special attention to modifications made by anonymous users. On my watch list I have pages which I monitor for all edits, but much more are simply pages where I cannot really contribute, but I know enough to recognize vandalism. 95% of vandals are anonymous editors, whose name is just an IP. Therefore I check every edit made by not registered editors. Becase of bot runs I have to check 20 times more articles. And I am not always doing this.
I propose the following solution: make it a policy for bots to report in the edit summary the username of the author of the previous edit.
Still better, the edit summary of the ppevious edit would come handy, and bot's message could be done via link to it, like this: " bot:1026", so that it will take small space. Mikkalai 04:59, 1 May 2005 (UTC)
Does anyone know when Mediawiki 1.5 will be released or what new features it may have? Thanks.
I've been thinking about adding more screen shots to movie and TV show articles (the ones in my DVD collection, at least), and wanted to get some feedback about how much might be too much regarding what we could claim as fair use. Can a good argument be made for adding them when we already have a movie poster or DVD cover image, and how many is too many for an article? Could we justify illustrating several major scenes from a film? Consider this if the screen shots are taken by a digital camera from a large screen TV, rather than DVD rips, so the image quality obviously could not substitute for the original in any way. Postdlf 20:57, 29 Apr 2005 (UTC)
A somewhat related issue I've been thinking about regards images from DVD and other media covers. Do you think it is still justifiable fair use, less, or more so, if only part of the image is used? What if the title and other text is part of what is cropped off, so it no longer functions as a product identifier? I added Image:SMG Buffy season 2.jpg to Sarah Michelle Gellar, and cropped everything but her face, but I'm somewhat uncertain about how this affects the fair use argument. I don't remember reading any case law that would give me a clear answer to this, and I will try to research it more when I have the time, but I wanted to know if this has been discussed before or if anyone has any thoughts. Assume that the image is clearly identified as coming from the original product, both on the image description page and in its captions in any article. Postdlf 21:03, 29 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I couldn't think of any existing titles that I could search for off the bat, but I've been updating the new TheoWiki.com and started to create an article called AEnon. Then I realized that it's really Ænon. Can English titles only take the common 26 letters of the alphabet? I can't find anything that mentions this in Wikipedia Help ( Help:Special_characters, for example). Update: I notice that I can create a title with Æ, but is it the best policy to use the regular alphabet instead? I've also noticed that I can use ! (like Yahoo! in the tile, but haven't looked for any other punctuation in the titles other than a period.
The article Cricket has been turned into a Wikipedia:Wikiportal in the main article namespace. A controversy has arisen about whether or not this is desirable or in line with policies and conventions, and at least one user is opposed to having the article returned to its regular state (which I think is a simple disambiguation page between the insect, sport, and some other miscellany). Please see Talk:Cricket. - Fennec (はさばくのきつね) 23:45, 28 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Since we couldn't get this one resolved on Votes for Undeletion, I'm going to pose the question here. The question is: Does appearing in Who's Who automatically qualify a person for an article in Wikipedia? Your everyday housewife won't be able to get in there, after all. Wiwaxia 22:12, 27 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Let's try to be simple about it: I tend to believe Who's Who is completely worthless for determining notability, having been in a couple myself for no particular reason I can ascertain, so we would need some other way to demonstrate noteworthiness. If the idea is that they get listed in Who's Who because they are noteworthy, then obviously there should be some other way for them to demonstrate that notewortiness without relying on Who's Who. In both cases, Who's Who itself becomes irrelevant and thus should be simply ignored. DreamGuy 05:35, Apr 28, 2005 (UTC)
Please read and contribute to Wikipedia:Userspace policy proposal. There has been recent controversy about what is and is not permissible in user space. It is important to assert which policies (if any) do apply in userspace, and to what extent, and what should be done about transgression. R adiant _* 10:09, Apr 27, 2005 (UTC)