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Can we please get a Guideline, if not a Policy, prohibiting the use of superfluous images? As I first noted at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Stub sorting#Images on stub templates starting to slow Wikipedia (again), the past few days it has started taking forever (often) to load images. Instead of throwing a bunch more money at upgrading hardware just to serve up tens of thousands of, at best, "nice to have" images, let's get of all superfluous images. The two main ones I think we should get rid of due to lack of utility are all images on Stub templates, and all images used in User Signatures. Other people may be able to think of other categories of images that we really don't need. Actually, all that are used somewhere other than the main Article Namespace should probably be carefully scrutinized as to whether they actually provide enough benefit to justify the (REAL $$$) cost. Niteowlneils 21:35, 10 November 2005 (UTC)
Hmmm, I think we need to actually see the numbers first, before deciding. Often site performance is somewhat counter-intuitive, especially with the wierd web of servers and proxies on multiple continents that wikipedia currently uses. Kim Bruning 23:43, 10 November 2005 (UTC)
This is silly. Niteowlneils, you started the Images on stub templates starting to slow Wikipedia (again) section; are you a developer? Do you have the server logs? Consider which pages are accessed before looking for scapegoats.
Wikipedia is the 38th most popular site on the internet. Where do all the anonymous visitors who make it that popular go? I suspect the main page is the heaviest contributor to server load, followed by the hundred most popular pages. These are all in the main namespace, and accesses to these pages probably dwarf talk page accesses by orders of magnitude. There are no signatures in the main namespace (except for articles signed by newbies). The most popular pages are not stubs. If the servers really are overloaded by images, and the slowness is not simply caused by a combination of your browser and connection (I haven't seen problems with images loading), why not start by taking the sister project images off the main page? ‣ᓛᖁ ᑐ 20:09, 12 November 2005 (UTC)
I am glad to see some people calling for actual numbers before such a decision is made, but discouraged that noone has provided such numbers and even more discouraged that discussion proceeds without obtaining those numbers.
Waterguy, here're the problems with your last sentence: you don't have evidence that umpteen megabytes of stub images are being served. While you have correctly asserted that there is a non-negative, non-zero cost involved in serving these images, you still have no evidence about the exact value or order of magnitude of that cost. So let me pose a scenario:
If stub images are causing 50% of the load on the image server, then eliminating stub images will eliminate 50% of the load and give us a 100% speedup. That would be spectacular! I would very much push for that, at least on a temporary basis. Perhaps even permanent.
But suppose stub images are causing 1% of the load on the image server. In that case, completely eliminating them will provide us only a 1% speedup. We will have effectively accomplished next to nothing, and it make take somebody all day to go make the change, too.
Quite possibly stub images are only 0.01% of the load. Neither you nor I actually know, do we? Yes, eliminating the stub images will definitely cause a speedup, no matter what. But you haven't yet proved that that speedup will not be simply negligible, so adamantly calling for this change doesn't make any sense, yet.
Can someone get some numbers? Percentage of images served broken down by the namespace of the page they are on, broken down by whether or not they are in a template, expressed as number of images served/number of actual connection attempts versus number of bytes served, showing how many images are being found in the cache, etc.? Without numbers this discussion is a relatively pointless brainstorming exercise. With numbers, we might see all kinds of other much more effective solutions. It might be apparent that the real thing to do is limit the size of the images by having their quality automatically scaled down. Or that we simply need to add RAM to the cache and retune it. Jdavidb ( talk • contribs) 21:02, 16 November 2005 (UTC)
Hard disk drives are the bottleneck. While stub images are small files, 1kB or less, they can have as much effect on server performance as large image files of several tens or hundreds of kilobytes. The reason is that the disk drives on which they are stored need to seek to the proper track, then wait for the disk to rotate to the proper sector (see latency). Head positioning takes orders of magnitude longer than reading the data and transmitting them to the requestor once the head is on track. Use of any images on Wikipedia should be done sparingly. Because there is such a tremendous variety of them, there is no practical way to cache all of them in solid-state memory. If using images everywhere is that important, the only practical way to solve the problem may be to move the most-requested ones to solid-state drives, which are very, very fast, but also very expensive. The system would also need to keep statistics on image file accesses in order to manage such caching. Unfortunately, mechanical hard disks have been leading solid-state memory down the price curve in cost-per-megabyte for decades, and there seems to be no end in sight yet. (Take it from someone who's worked in the hard disk drive industry since 1980.) -- Quicksilver T @ 19:00, 18 November 2005 (UTC)
There is currently a new proposal for a naming convention for articles about countries: Wikipedia:Naming conventions (countries). -- bainer ( talk) 00:05, 18 November 2005 (UTC)
I was surprised to find a large number of cricket articles (results of various matches), such as Sussex_v_Middlesex_4_July_2005 and Durham_v_Leicestershire_1_July_2005. How does this fit into Policy? Is this material part of an Encyclopedia? LoopZilla 09:43, 16 November 2005 (UTC)
The discussion whether it should be
OR
is still not concluded.
The first of these options equals the second, apart from: In the first option wikipedia:naming conventions (common names) is described as an exception to the names and titles NC guideline. The second option has the same content, only this option starts from the common names principle, providing solutions where that principle is not unambiguous. This way of putting it (that in practice does not lead to differences in page name all that often), is however better suited to link nobility naming conventions to the central ideas of wikipedia:naming conventions (people).
Someone thought it wise to hasten the discussion by listing the "Western nobility" NC guideline at MfD, see Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:Naming conventions (Western nobility)
Anyway, both options are discussed at Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (names and titles)#proposed tag, that's where I would group the discussion.
-- Francis Schonken 10:00, 20 November 2005 (UTC)
I know we've decided against hosting mp3s at Wikipedia. However, Let It Be... Naked has something a little different: hotlinks to WalMart mp3 samples. I'm guessing this is at least against policy. Deltabeignet 07:34, 20 November 2005 (UTC)
I have found that Special:Deadendpages and Special:Lonelypages have several candidates ripe for deletion under WP:CV and WP:AFD, however these are not updated regularly. Also, the lists as they stand are arranged alphabetically but only the first 1000 entries are available as the report. It means that articles starting with alphabet D onwards would almost not find any mention. The associated talkpages for these 2 pages are largely inactive. -- Gurubrahma 13:40, 14 November 2005 (UTC)
I wonder if someone could tell me if there is a policy about using one photograph in more than one article? I have posted a couple of photographs which I thought were pertinent to two entries - but it occurred to me that this may be a "no-no". Please let me know if this practice is discouraged, or whether it is O.K.
Many thanks,
John Hill John Hill 00:55, 21 November 2005 (UTC)
A new proposal on the representation of Norse mythology names is now up for a vote. - Haukur Þorgeirsson 00:51, 19 November 2005 (UTC)
Why is someone is creating articles like January 21, 2003? If it's to split the January 21 and the 2003 article, I don't think it is right. The years and and the months pages are after all articles that waits to be expanded. There's no need to create an encyclopedic article for every day in the year. I propose they all be deleted and merged back to their original article, regarading that this step hasn't been discussed before. CG 18:23, 13 November 2005 (UTC)
First, I would like to say that when I first started on Wikipedia I was very supportive of the current policy of allowing anonymous users to edit articles, but as I have become more active in improving articles I am frustrated by the constant vandalism I see. It is almost always anonymous users who do this. Please do NOT refer to me to Perennial proposals I have already given my thoughts on that page nobody looks at it anyway. I'm sick of anonymous users vandalism, and I think the benefits far outweigh the possible drawbacks. of course there are some good anonymous users in that mess of trolls & vandals, but most of the serious wikipedians have registered already. I'm feeling very angry, because I feel there is nothing I can do to change the policy. I am writing this here as a demand for a change in the policy to a policy where one must register to edit articles, nothing more, nothing less. -- Revolución ( talk) 02:54, 7 November 2005 (UTC)
I think it would be good to stop anonymous users from creating new articles, or at least having them go through moderation. Anonymous users are responsible for almost all of the non-image copyright violations on Wikipedia and they are usually on pages that the user has created. Also, anonymous users create almost all of the articles speedily deleted and a substantial number of the articles deleted at Articles for Deletion. It's relatively easy to revert a bad edit, but it's much more time consuming to have an article go through the deletion process on Copyright Problems or Articles for Deletion.
One of the difficulties with making these changes is that many editors have a doomsday prediction about what will happen if the rules are changed. We can make the change temporary and revert if it causes problems. -- Kjkolb 00:09, 11 November 2005 (UTC)
Are there any statistics available on the contributions of logged-in vs. not-logged-in edits with respect to numbers in the several dimensions of a) sheer volume, b) edits per article, c) article creations, d) proportion of edits per article on those created by logged-in users, e) proportion of edits per article on those created by not-logged-in users? Looking at these numbers together might provide a better picture of the contributions of each editor group rather than relying on anecdotal evidence (though I believe in the anecdotal conclusion of their being largely positive and concur based on my own personal experience). Thanks for considering this .. perhaps someone who has experience in SQL access to the database could run a few queries, put the results in a page in the Wikipedia namespace in the Category:Wikipedia statistics. Courtland 00:42, 12 November 2005 (UTC)
I share Revolución's frustration. In cases of page vandalism, I frequently check the contributions of non-registered users (IP address only). In most cases, if that IP address vandalized one page, all the rest of the contributions from that IP address are garbage, too. However, what if the user is sitting at a terminal in his/her public library? In one instance the input is garbage, in another it's great stuff, because a different person is using the terminal. For this reason it's making me rethink whether there's any point to posting warnings to the talk pages of non-registered users. The non-registered users may not even be familiar enough with Wikipedia to realize that they have a talk page, and may thus never see any warnings posted to the IP address they're using. Moreover, with dynamic IP address assignment, a vandal could be wandering around town with his notebook computer and logging in through WiFi hotspots, getting a different IP address each time. Since creating an account on Wikipedia is so easy, forcing users to log in before letting them edit is only a slight inconvenience to determined vandals, who'll gladly create any number of gibberish user names to do what they did with just an IP address the day before. I suspect the only thing that dissuades vandals from continuing is that they guess that something is afoot when they vandalize a page and revisit it a few days later to find their handiwork gone, and eventually just give up when it happens repeatedly. -- Quicksilver T @ 19:36, 18 November 2005 (UTC)
Being quite new to Wikipedia, I have yet to run into the problem Rick (as well as many others) has experienced with vandalism (although, I hardly look forward to the day when it'll occur to the articles I've contributed to). Perhaps some mechanisms could be put into place to specifically handle the vandalism problem. Articles could allow anonymous posting, and in the event vandalism occurs, the article could be locked so only registered users could make edits. I'm as idealistic as the next person with regards to anonymous editors, but as usual, the few bad apples ruin the bunch for everyone. -- BrandonG 03:12, 21 November 2005 (UTC)
Recently there has been some discussion among mathematically-inclined editors on the make technical articles accessible policy. I would like to invite the broader Wikipedia community to help us sort this out. My position is that we must start to recognise that Wikipedia has moved beyond a general-audience encyclopaedia, and now serves specialist communities as well. The policy needs to change to reflect this.
For example, this morning I found a "too technical" tag placed on the article class field theory. Of course I agree that the article is too technical for most readers to understand. But sorry — that's just the way it is. I'm a PhD student studying algebraic number theory (the area of mathematics in which class field theory lives) and I myself have trouble really understanding what class field theory is all about. In fact, the current Wikipedia article on class field theory is far less technical than any other description I have seen before.
The difficulty is this: class field theory is about certain things called abelian field extensions. The author is not trying to be fancy or trying to impress anyone by using the technical terms "abelian" and "field extension". Unfortunately, it just isn't possible to simplify anything by using less technical terms. If you haven't ever done time studying Galois theory (which includes practically the entire "general audience"), then you simply can't make sense of these terms. It's not something you can just pick up in an idle afternoon.
The aims of make technical articles accessible are admirable. I certainly agree that articles should be made as accessible as possible. But a line has to be drawn somewhere. Dmharvey File:User dmharvey sig.png Talk 18:53, 11 November 2005 (UTC)
One requests to people who put the {{ technical}} template. Please take some time to explain either on the talk page or in the edit summary what exactly you think is a problem, and if possible suggestions for its improvement. It is not right for a person to just take a look at an article, say "Gosh, what is that?", put a technical template and walk away. First, the tag might not be justfified, and second, the article authors might sincerely believe that the article is already acessible enough, and your insight might be very valuable. Oleg Alexandrov ( talk) 23:50, 11 November 2005 (UTC)
It is with some sadness that I watch a trend of anti-intellectualism grow with pages tagged with the {tl|technical}} template or with comments appended to talk pages describing the contents of academic pages as "gibberish" simply because they use the jargon of the subject area (even though extensively linked to explanatory pages). I might agree with the spirit of what Shimgray says, i.e. that there is sometimes a need for technical articles to be translated into lay language. It serves the purpose of making basic concepts more accessible to those without the academic background. I speculate that the success of the [Enter subject] for Dummies series of books profitably serves this need. However, when a specialist writes a page for other specialists, whether it be in science, mathematics, law, philosophy, or baseball, it is appropriate to use the jargon and expertise of that specialism (appropriately linked to explanatory pages for those who want to understand more). If this is arguing the case for a two-tier forking of pages into technical and introductory, then so be it. Those who wish to make sometimes abstruse material more comprehensible can provide a translation service where access to the content will serve a public good. But let us all have a little more respect for those editors with the drive to write pages on the Wikipedia, no matter what their intended market. So, to clarify my response to this topic as titled, it is the mere appending of non-constructive comments and general unwillingness to co-operate in the building of consensus material that is deeply frustrating. If those who object to pages had the humility to frankly admit what is not understood so that remedial action could be taken, accessibility could slowly evolve. But it seems that there is too much fear and insecurity in the world for this to happen. David91 05:10, 13 November 2005 (UTC)
I agree that class field theory is probably never going to be accessible to an average non-mathematician, but I do think that there is a certain elitism involved in not even parenthetically explaining that "abelian" in this context means "commutative", a word known to all who study mathematics, and not just to algebraists. It should be possible to write this article so that an average third-year undergraduate in mathematics could read it. -- Jmabel | Talk 21:11, 13 November 2005 (UTC)
The technical template currently encourages people to add non-technical explanations without removing the technical material. I don't see why this is a problem. I recently put a technical tag on atenolol, a drug that I take. A few months ago, I understood everything in the article. Now, I only understand the things that I pulled out of the edit history after the non-technical explanation was erased. Wikipedia is for everyone — experts and non-experts alike. And so we should include information for both groups, not deleting one kind of information or the other. /soapbox Jacqui ★ 05:05, 22 November 2005 (UTC)
Hello, I was having a debate at Talk:Moscow with some posters who want to glide over the problems or the unpleasant aspects of Moscow, when after arguing for inclusion I realised, on looking around, that most of the articles on cities try to present a sort of tourist agency view on everything. Sure, the best aspects of each city need emphasis, but I think it's extremely deceptive to talk about large cities without mentioning the problems they face. I just noticed for instance that London makes no mention of the squalor that is visible in many parts of the city and which has been one of its major attributes for ages - in the past two centuries alone these depressing parts of London, or the experiences from within, have given rise to many of the great works of sociology, literature and so on. I think there needs to be a change in the approach to writing such articles - apart from mentioning all the wonderful museums, galleries and other tourist spots, there needs to be some perspective offered to the curious reader, not just the kind of information that any tourist brochure or guidebook will give you; in fact, even some travel books are more honest about the areas to avoid, among other things, than Wikipedia is! Of course, every large city has more or less the same kinds of problems. But they all manifest themselves in different ways and to different degrees; corruption for instance is a problem in every part of the world, but it is much more widespread or common at lower levels in certain cities than others; squalor is also visible in every major American or English city, but to a much greater extent than in other industrialized nations like Canada and Australia; housing projects are extremely common now but they are much more numerous - in fact overwhelming and depressing - in, say, South American cities like Sao Paulo, than the ones outside Vienna or Frankfurt; public transport in London is shockingly overpriced and a lot less reliable compared to the equally extensive public transport in Moscow. Not everyone who lives in a big city is necessarily a middle-class, median income, lifelong resident, and the majority of those who aren't face a lot of difficulties, and so would an independent, budget traveller. These articles need to be more rounded out to reflect actual life in these cities, not just a listing of popular spots, and I'd like to see some guidelines to this end. -- Simonides 00:11, 15 November 2005 (UTC)
First, thank you all for the responses.
Second, David, I don't know and can't say whether your own edits are due to a certain allegiance (we all have our own), but I agree with you fully on the general kinds of problems editors face here. At least, it is one of the two most serious problems on Wikipedia - 1) POV pushing and systemic bias (which User:Xed has written about eloquently and which I used to keep pointing out, in different words, before he joined); ie the lapse into a default, parochial perspective on all non-Anglophone topics, and 2) seriously dumb edits by people who, for whatever reason, will argue the same point over and over and keep reverting without actually taking any effort to read the article, read the Talk page, check any facts, correct themselves, present any genuine arguments, and so on. Often the two habits go together. It's more serious than vandalism in my opinion, because vandalism rarely amounts to circuitous rhetoric, and will not have supporters among the admin and other users, who keep popping by to 'correct' or 'NPOV' the issue - in their favour. On a more optimistic note, there are some bright minds here too, and sometimes either the latter take charge or some people finally see the light of day, so if you keep holding your ground, the majority of non-aligned editors will finally see the value of your position and defend it. Case in point - a year ago, before I quit WP (I was hoping permanently - sigh) I kept pointing out the irritating Americentrism of all the News and Current Events page and drafting guidelines everyone ignored or voted against. After a lot of heated arguments and risks of banning, someone finally turned things around while I was away. -- Simonides 13:02, 23 November 2005 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Article_point_of_view_vs_NPOV is a proposed amendment to the policy on Neutral Point of View, as applied to articles that describe a specific point of view. -- Iantresman 14:29, 24 November 2005 (UTC)
Don't know if this is the right section. User:CalJW wants to convert Category:Philippine sites to Category:Landmarks_in_the_Philippines . [ See here]. His previous proposal was tourist attraction.
He also wants to delete Category: Places in Cuba. For some reason , places and locations are ambigous to him.
CalJW has done a laudable and respectable job converting and creating categories, however, I've done a lot of work on categories in the Philippines and I think a places or locations categories are needed which he feels are not.
Wikipedia is not a tourism site! There are Category:Star Wars locations, Category:Bible places, Category:New Testament places and Category:Torah places. I don't see anything vague with the meaning of place. Buildings and places have totally different meanings. -- Jondel 07:33, 24 November 2005 (UTC)
The whole speedy deletion thing has become utterly over- nomic-ed with CSD, let's get rid of it!
Kim Bruning 01:06, 24 November 2005 (UTC)
On Wikipedia talk:What Wikipedia is not#Proposal to modify WP:NOT an image gallery, I proposed the following change to this policy:
I propose we change this to:
Following general agreement to the principles behind the change amongst participants on that talk page, and three explicit messages of support for the proposed change, I made the change, which has been criticised later on WP:VFD by User:Splash (who raised no concrete objections to the change, but objected to the manner in which the change to policy was executed), and User:Aaron Brenneman reversed the change asserting that the change requires more input.
Observe that several galleries have survived well-participated AfDs, eg. Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Gallery of illuminated manuscript images.
Please participate in this discussion! --- Charles Stewart 00:44, 24 November 2005 (UTC)
I have seen quite a few editors leave wikipedia because of the soft approach to vandalism. Why do serial and blatant vandals get such soft warnings such as the one below:
Thanks for experimenting with Wikipedia. Your test worked, and has been reverted or removed. Please use the sandbox for any other tests you want to do. Take a look at the welcome page if you would like to learn more about contributing to our encyclopedia. Thanks.
The above template is currently the standard warning for examples of vandalism such as Amy is extremely ugly !!!!! and worse. This is obviously not a test, or a user experimenting with wikipedia. These are examples of malicious editing and I think it is silly to suggest such a user experiment in the sandbox. One strike and you're out should be standard policy for this type of vandalism not the five or so warning that seem to be the current norm. David D. (Talk) 16:50, 9 November 2005 (UTC)
Please do not add gossip to wikipedia. Take a look at the welcome page if you would like to learn more about contributing to our encyclopedia. Thanks.
To be honest test mostly says that we saw that. Most vandels stop as soon as they relise they have been spoted. Geni 23:13, 9 November 2005 (UTC)
Hi
I've just created a very short proposal at Wikipedia:Be cautious. Now I'm going to get under the desk for a while. Filiocht | The kettle's on 11:55, 25 November 2005 (UTC)
Do we have a policy yet on the placing of portal links?
Now on the whole I think portals (as found in Category:Portals) are a very good thing. They help readers explore a subject and they help stimulate editors to expand articles and round out subject areas. However, the placement of portal link templates on articles seems to be somewhat random and inconsistent. Contrast these examples;
To my mind, portal links are rather similar to the links to sister projects and so the Canada article has the best placement. I would also argue that anything that is not about the article itself should not detract from the content of the article.
I think there have been a number of mild conflicts over this sort of thing in the past. The situtation often seems to be similar to editors who like to place navigation boxes at the top or top right of related page. Some of the issues verge on spam linking, where the creators of a new portal want as many people as possible to see the new portal and so add links to as many articles as possible, as prominently as possible. -- Solipsist 07:43, 25 November 2005 (UTC)
There's a proposal at Wikipedia_talk:Verifiability#References_title_misread_as_non-web_External_links to change the References header to "Sources", and External links to "Further reading". So far, the proposal has been accepted by all the editors on the page, but because this is a policy page, I'm putting it here for further discussion before changing it.
The reason for the proposal is that using "References" and "External links" is confusing. Sources are supposed to be listed under References, and any further reading is listed under Further reading or External links. But many editors think that any external links, whether used as sources or not, should go under External links, so then they list any material that isn't online, like books, under References, even if not used as a source. To cut through all this confusion, the proposal is to change the headers to Sources and Further reading, which are self-explanatory, and don't make the online/offline distinction. Comments would be welcomed. SlimVirgin (talk) 21:53, 25 November 2005 (UTC)
Agree to change
Oppose
There are many articles about countries' relations, but with great differences between their titles:
The only stable format that is used is with relations with the United Nations (see Category:United Nations relations)
Anyway there should be a naming convention about these kind of articles. CG 15:01, 27 November 2005 (UTC)
We currently have a debate at wikt:Wiktionary:Beer parlour#Neat icons about weather or not to start to include small icons as they do in the French Wiktionary. Most people seem to think that these icons will have a detrimental effect on the loading of pages. I believe that this is a misguided view caused by their lack of experience with using pictures. I would appreciate if people can leave comments there and perhaps vote as Wikipedia users have more experience using pictures then Wiktionary users do. Gerard Foley 00:47, 27 November 2005 (UTC)
I'm surprised how few people actually know that there isn't going to be an open arbcom election this year, so I'd mention this here as well. Jimbo has announced he will hand-pick new ArbCom candidates rather than have an open election for them, then have the public vote on his selections, with 50% support required to pass. See Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee Elections December 2005/Straw poll. R adiant _>|< 20:22, 26 November 2005 (UTC)
Dear fellow Wikipedians, here is the solution to Wikipedia's problem: Wikipedia:Requests for publication -- Zondor 17:12, 26 November 2005 (UTC)
I propose the following policy for handling April Fools Day:
The intent of the policy is to (a) streamline the correction of April Fools pranks, (b) maintain core wikipedia functionality on April Fools Day, (c) redirect the efforts of April Fools pranksters to higher quality & more interesting pranks, (d) allow wikified preperation of pranks ahead of time, and (e) maintain goodwill between everyone. Actually, we don't even need the scripts really, we could just say that pranks will only be permitted if they follow the /NotAprilFools and {{AprilFools}} guidlines. I just thought the scripts kept it cleaner. Thoughts? - JeffBurdges 15:19, 22 November 2005 (UTC)
Maybe we should consider implementing such rules by appeal to the better nature of wikipedian interested in general article? If Rick Block is right that few people would follow the policy, we could try the following:
Thoughts? Does anyone have something they would like to see in an April Fools policy which this does not provide? - JeffBurdges 01:23, 23 November 2005 (UTC)
November 2005 (UTC)
One technical measure of which I would approve is a lock on the MediaWiki namespace for the day. Messing about with the site interface is, in my opinion, going a bit too far. — Dan | Talk 03:59, 23 November 2005 (UTC)
What do we need special policy for? The normal rules apply. Geni 04:32, 23 November 2005 (UTC)
Alright, it seems wikipedia has plenty of humorless snobs, just made Template:AprilFools and its allready been nominated for deletion. :) Here is the code of my suggested template: :<div class="boilerplate" id="AprilFools">''April Fools! The [[{{NAMESPACE}}:{{PAGENAME}}/NotAprilFools|original article]] will be back tomarrow.''</div>
There was a discussion on the mailing list the day before this year's April Fools that seemed to be gaining some steam (including some praise from Jimbo himself), but probably came too late. In keeping the fun of April Fools with the desire to present legitimate information in a responsible way, we should actually present real articles that seem a little "out of place". One or more unusual articles can be brought up to FA standard, and a few unusual or unbelievable pieces of trivia (or maybe the truth reworded to sound unbelievable). People reading the main page would be absolutely convinced that these articles are false and an April Fools joke, but the joke's on them! These articles are real and true! For an article to be brought up to FA status, an article like exploding whale (which is already FA, so it can't be used again) or any currently non-FAs in Wikipedia:Unusual articles could be done. That would be the FA for the day. The "previous FAs" could link to exploding whale and other unusual articles that were already FA and therefore can't be used for 2006. Examples of facts presented in an unbelievable way can include the fact that Queen Elizabeth II was once a driver and changed the wheel of a lorry when she was younger (see here, and we could include the picture on the front page too with a modified caption, like "Princess Elizabeth changes the wheel of a lorry during her stint as a driver"). This takes some work, so I think work on this should start early, maybe a month before April Fools. -- D e ath phoenix 14:37, 23 November 2005 (UTC)
Creating one or two good April Fool's articles is one thing, but this last April 1st things went beyond that, with edit warring on the Main Page, blocks and unblocks of admins, editing of the tabs in the MediaWiki namespace, name-calling, etc. It was all rather juvenile in my opinion. If that happens again in 2006, every admin involved should be RFC'd and then RFAR'd for abuse of admin priviledges. Blank Verse 14:41, 23 November 2005 (UTC)
I instead propose that we impose a one-week ban on people who knowingly deface the encyclopedia in the name of fun on April Fools. You want to do april fools? Celebrate it someplace else. It's stupid to waste developer time to make it easy to be an idiot, and it's stupid that other people should need to clean up the mess. It'd be sad if necessary, but if need be the entire wikipedia should perhaps be locked on that day to stop people who should know better. -- Improv 16:13, 23 November 2005 (UTC)
I am completely in favor of doing something that looks like an April Fool's prank but isn't.
I am opposed to tolerating real April Fool's pranks and would happily support locking the whole wikipedia for a day if that's what's required to deal with it.
April Fool's pranks are fun if the audience eventually "gets it." Unfortunately history shows that many people do not get this kind of humor no matter how broad it is. Even if it says "April Fool" in so many words at the bottom of the page, people don't necessarily read to the end.
April Fool articles are one thing in a publication like Datamation (hah! that's a good test of how old you are), because there is reason to believe the editors know their audience (and can gauge the credulity level appropriately). They are something else in a publication with as wide a readership as Wikipedia. Even Technology Review once ran an April Fool's piece that was picked up as real by the news media.
For an encyclopedia to intentionally disseminate inaccurate information isn't funny. Or, as they used to say in L'il Abner (another age test) "If thas' a joke, Ah fails to see th' hoomor in it. Or: "tain't funny, McGee!" (Now, that one IS before my time...) Dpbsmith (talk) 16:53, 23 November 2005 (UTC)
Should people actually want a technical solution, like locking wikipedia, a solution less likely to bring on more trolls would be hosting a locked copy on en.locked.wikipedia.org, with links to it from every page. Not a very wiki solution really, but workable. JeffBurdges 17:23, 23 November 2005 (UTC)
I think we could use some guidance here. Soccer fans had been referring to their sport as "football" on Current sports events, despite the mentions of several other types of "football" games on the page. I was under the impression that the compromise term " football (soccer)" had been created to be used in potentially ambiguous or controversial situations. I changed all of the "football" references to "football (soccer)" and put a note on the talk page asking people to use the latter term in the future. A British user objected and changed all the references back. He said soccer is the world game, the true football, etc., etc. and could not be convinced to use the compromise term. So I put a note on Wikipedia:Wikiquette alerts. After doing so, three more British people came to talk:Current sports events and, rather than lecturing the "football" guy for breaking what I thought was Wikipedia practice, supported him. Then an American came to the article page and changed all the "football" references to "soccer," screwing up all the wikilinks in the process.
How can we avoid revert wars and another tedious American English vs. British English argument? -- Mwalcoff 23:49, 15 November 2005 (UTC)
Another option is to go with "dribbling sport" as described by the RFU museum Year 1863 ;-)
-- Philip Baird Shearer 23:53, 20 November 2005 (UTC)
This subject rugger soccer etc is described on the Football page and is done to death in the archives ( Talk:Football). I think I have read all the points made here apart from the one about "European football". What does that make the Six Nations Championship? Perhapse Kiwi football :-( -- Philip Baird Shearer 00:06, 21 November 2005 (UTC)
I'm a few days late on this, but there's nothing about this issue that's unique to football (soccer). Be clear in your writing—if a term is ambiguous and not clear in context (as when referencing one of three popular sports on the Main Page, or on first reference in an article), spell it out. As an American, I would never simply write "soccer" knowing that it's a term unfamiliar to a non-trivial segment of my audience. I know the sport's capable of inciting riots in other parts of the world, but jingoism has no place in NPOV writing. Austin Hair ✍ ✉ 02:18, 27 November 2005 (UTC)
In response to the overwhelming level of vandalism at George W. Bush, a few users have proposed a better set of tools to use to combat vandalism, without resorting to the anti-wiki full protect; See Wikipedia:Semi-protection policy - Mys e ku rity 05:38, 29 November 2005 (UTC)
After 2 msgs 12 minutes apart, an editor added A9 to CSD. I can't tell whether the following response might have been intended sarcastically:
but in any case i am so far the only nay-sayer. We have gotten along without A9 for nearly 5 years, and the idea of introducing a new excuse for immediate deletion in this fashion is outrageous. I removed A9, tho i'm not sure there is any harm in it. There is definite harm in using this kind of shoot-from-the-hip process to authorize immediate deletion.
--
Jerzy•
t 18:46, 28 November 2005 (UTC)
Oh, sorry, that discussion is at
Wikipedia talk:Criteria for speedy deletion#Unneeded disambig pages.
--
Jerzy•
t 18:49, 28 November 2005 (UTC)
This issue is actually about moving a page to its proper name, which can be done through WP:RM (more discussion on talk page). Demi T/ C 00:29, 29 November 2005 (UTC)
Friday and Saturday night, I was editing Wikipedia and encountered "the datbase is locked" conditions. Is this something that happened automatically, or is somebody locking the database? If it's being done by a person, could they give us some warning? How long does this database locked condition normally last? User:Zoe| (talk) 03:12, 28 November 2005 (UTC)
I have created a proposal which would allow the use of non-free images in special cases outside the encyclopedia. See Wikipedia:Licensing for community images; comments welcome. Thue | talk 17:04, 21 November 2005 (UTC)
The Cambridge Union Society is obviously notable, because of its age and past members, but how are the current or recent officers of any interest to anyone outside the society itself? A recently added article on a student society is that on the Oxford Law Society, "famous within Oxford due to its reputation for hosting large free parties and quality balls" (is it famous for anything else?), which has a long list of current committee members, but nothing on history or anything else of more general interest.
We should have some guidelines on student societies in general (as current deletion policy seem to be very inconsistent), but also on what to include in such articles, when the notability of the society itself is not in question. Former active members who have gone on to do notable things should be included, as it helps establish the notability of the society. Current or very recent elected officers should definitely be left out, unless there are exceptional reasons to include any such individual. Tupsharru 10:19, 21 November 2005 (UTC)
List of U.S. Presidential pets - Is this notable? Even if I were to accept the need for a list, I'd feel that having separate articles such as Socks (cat) may be uncalled for. I am saying this because articles such as Arabella Kennedy were deleted. I don't know if there is a policy, but I thought it'd be safe to ask here. -- Gurubrahma 05:55, 28 November 2005 (UTC)
There has been a debate on the Lyrebird article page, where an editor keeps taking information about Australian folklore, dating back to the late 1800's with regard to lyrebirds, and transferring the information to the Talk:Lyrebird because there is no given source to go with the folklore comment.
I feel that the information should be on the main article, and not just 'tucked away' on the discussion page, where people who may be interested may not be able to find it. Folkfore is handed down from generation to generation by 'word of mouth' and, as such, deserves its place on the main article, irrespective of whether, or not, there is a verifiable source for the information.
Could I please have input by other Wikipedians about this. Thank you. Figaro 14:53, 25 November 2005 (UTC)
I am currently in an edit war on Robert De Niro. Certain users keep trying to change American to Italian American. Personally I think it is wrong to include ethnic identifiers in the headers as this is not done in other good encyclopedias like Britannica, mainly because often is not entirely accurate. I am not against mentioning that De Niro identifies as an Italian American in an article, just not in the header. There was also a similar problem in the Leonard Nimoy and Alicia Silverstone article with people replacing American with Jewish American, probably with many other bios also. Is there any kind of guideline that would support my stance here or should I apply to create one? Arniep 20:07, 12 November 2005 (UTC)
I agree that nationality rather than ethnicity or religion is appropriate for the header. Many people though, think of someone's "nation" as the group that they belong to, not the state in which they live. We here in the United States of America don't usually make the distinction, but in Moscow for instance if you ask someone their nationality, the response might be Russian, or Jewish. My point is that the word "Nationality" really has more than one meaning. In most biographies, I would consider someone's religion, or ethnic background to be of secondary interest. I generally don't even mention someone's religion unless they are a religious leader or somesuch. Morris 20:57, 12 November 2005 (UTC)
I think this really varies. It would be very odd not to mention in the lead that Booker T. Washington was African American or that Abraham Goldfaden was Jewish. But country should be there, too. -- Jmabel | Talk 21:15, 13 November 2005 (UTC)
I think that in most cases, it's inappropriate to put someone's ethnicity in the header. This came up with Paul Wolfowitz, which originally had his Jewish ethnicity in the lead paragraph. I said that there's no reason to include that unless we call Jeff Halpern a Jewish-American hockey player, Adam Horovitz a Jewish-American musician, etc.
That said, there are some cases in which ethnicity might be relevant in the first paragraph. One instance would be if the ethnicity is essential to the person's notability. It probably makes sense to call Rosa Parks an African-American civil-rights activist. Another case might be when the relationship between ethnicity and nationality is unclear. For example, medeival traveler Ibrahim ibn Jakub was, as the Polish Wikipedia calls him, a Jew of Arab origin from Spain. Nowadays, we'd just call someone from Spain a Spaniard no matter what his religion or ethnicity, but to call ibn Jakub simply a Spaniard would be confusing. -- Mwalcoff 05:18, 16 November 2005 (UTC)
Kim's on of the most on the ball Wikipedians I know, and I want to shuck my policymaking newcomer tag and help Kim in her crusade against outdated policies. Here's my ideas, let me know what you think. karmafist 18:51, 29 November 2005 (UTC)
This would replace our now ambiguous and frustrating policy creation process.
Anyone interested in this sort of thing might want to take a look at how the Wikipedia:Notability and Music Guidelines, which did not make it as policy, are being snuck into the Wikipedia:Criteria for speedy deletion rules. Strangely, no one there wants to put this to a vote... Trollderella 18:47, 29 November 2005 (UTC)
Ok, so technically it's winter. :-P
Policy has become all crufty and stuck, so I thought I'd try some policy spring cleaning. However, my initial efforts with broom, mop and featherduster are going really slowly. Guidelines somehow seem to bounce off each other and bounce right back, so I'm going to need some help cleaning 'em up, and basically cutting down on our rulecruft.
Note that I've earlier already gone and successfully did stuff like WP:SR, WP:TRI and WP:5P, so how hard can it get? Hmm, well pretty hard. "But but but *MY* guidelines are good, you should deprecate THOSE guidelines over there instead", and then there's delaying tactics, and stalling, and "gosh but that policy has been consensus since my uncle mortimer died in 1903" Ahuh, right... Okay....
What we need is cooperation, and tactics to gently pry people away from their comfortable blankets rules for a minute, so we can put them through a spin-cycle. (the rules that is, not the people ... well maybe the people too O:-) ) . My best effort on formulating tactics to-date is
here.
So fair deal, I need some help here. And I hardly dare ask, we couldn't, couldn't maybe get a consensus for a guidelines-freeze while we tidy stuff, could we?
Kim Bruning 17:13, 29 November 2005 (UTC)
I removed a link to a reference source of a New York times article posted in a forum on the web. Not sure of the policy, but I assume that wikipedia does not want to link to pages like that? Please discuss at the articles talk page. Gary_Stochl and talk:Gary_Stochl also how do I link to the reference, do I link to New York times web site that requires payment or not? Stefan 12:09, 28 November 2005 (UTC)
I have put a proposal Wikipedia talk:Ethno-cultural labels in biographies. Please edit and discuss abakharev 12:55, 2 December 2005 (UTC)
There's a recently introduced new feature called "Article validation" to make wikipedia more reliable, which will go live "very soon". I don't feel that "rating an article" is the correct approach. You're welcome to read the reasoning and discuss here: [3]. Cheers! Peter S. 12:42, 2 December 2005 (UTC)
I have started going through Special:UncategorizedCategories, and I've come upon this: Category:Animal liberation. It's a redirect to Category:Animal liberation movement, and so it shows up itself as empty and orphaned. Is this kind of category redirect a standard practice, or is it something that should be handled in some other way? -- SCZenz 22:05, 30 November 2005 (UTC)
In the article on the dubiously noteworthy Debra Lafave, someone (an IP, from today a username) as been repeatedly adding to the list of external links groups.yahoo.com/group/Debra_Lafave/, billing this as "Debra Lafave news and discussion". The opening page tells us that it's For fans of Debra Lafave, the sexiest ex-middle-school teacher on earth! [snip snip snip] So, without further adue, [sic] we present the life of Debra told in pictures.
Well actually they don't, because that's "Members Only". (And I for one am not letting my member get anywhere near it.)
To Locke Cole and myself, this looks like spamming a link that's inherently unencyclopedic:
But Locke and I don't want to be rapped over the knuckles by 3RR. Plus I'm not sure I'm Doing The Right Thing: I've gradually become aware that a great amount of what I regard as blather, trivia, fancruft, gossip, speculation, etc., is regarded as worthy encyclopedia content by lots of WP editors in good standing. So what say? -- Hoary 10:09, 29 November 2005 (UTC)
As part of work that has arisen on the talk page for WP:NPOV, I ended up trying to summarize in one sentence, what exactly Wikipedia is, in a way that shows exactly how NPOV, CITE, VERIFY and other major principles fitted in and were integral to it rather than arbitrary choices. This is what I came up with: User:FT2/ABOUT
My intent is to define Wikipedia concisely and precisely in under 10 words, in a way that clarifies why certain policies exist and work as they do, and the precise aim of Wikipedia in its approach to summarizing human knowledge. In doing so, it also shows that other core policies are not arbitrarily chosen, how they fit together as a coherent whole, and the reasons for these stated policies and principles.
Please review and discuss if it is useful. Does it have a place or use anywhere?
FT2 03:05, 3 December 2005 (UTC)
I added a merge tag on Monday at United Kingdom. I added it in good faith. There is a live discussion which seems to contain no hostility. Unfortunately the tag keeps being removed. Some people have removed but have not said they have. Some have commented, for example discussion has petered out but that was only 2 hours after the last comment. As of now, the discussion on the talk page has not mentioned the tag itself.
I am not a big fan of tags but I can tolerate one for three days during a live debate. I thought the whole point of a tag is so that readers can see it and join the ongoing debate. Please can others comment? Bobblewik 00:53, 2 December 2005 (UTC)
Sorry if this has been asked before, but I was just wondering if bands are supposed to be reffered to as a singluar object or a group. eg, "The Beatles is a band..." or "The Beatles are a band..." Thanks. SaltyWater 13:46, 1 December 2005 (UTC)
I have a related question. Which tense should be used when referring to now-defunct bands? Does the band as a concept keep existing in present tense even though they quit playing together years ago? And people, too. "Foo is an Australian musician who lived from 1900-1951..." pfctdayelise 21:57, 2 December 2005 (UTC)
I'm new to this whole Wikipedia contribution thing, so be easy on me. I run a Soul Calibur 3 website, and recently I found out someone had mirrored the videos I host on our website many months back and then posted them up here. However, the person who posted them here recently cleared his webserver so the videos are no longer available. Now I have a powerful webserver of my own and I would like to offer these videos once again to Wikipedia viewers. However, because this is my own website and I dont want people cross-linking to our videos without my express persmission; I require people to register on our website before they can download the video. Registration is COMPLETELY FREE. What would happen, if someone clicks on the link to a video from Wikipedia, and they are already registered on my website, they will be able to download the video. But if they are not registered, they will be asked to register; which only takes about 30 seconds.
Carnildo recently removed some of my Taki match videos from the Taki page because he said "external links should not require logins". I'm not making a complaint, but I didnt see anywhere that said it was against the rules. I spoke to some other people and they recommended I make a post here requesting some sort of decision made on this issue. But as I said before, its my own webserver and I can upload at amazingly fast speeds (try it), and registration is completely free. My website is http://www.crookedjester.com/ and our videos are available in the Gallery section. -- Jaxel 17:43, 26 November 2005 (UTC)
There is an ongoing discussion at NPOV regarding the subject of nested criticisms in an article, or quoting "critics of critics of critics" etc. when an original criticism of the article's subject is added. Please see [4]. Rangerdude 00:55, 4 December 2005 (UTC)
I'm requesting editor input on how to go about better defining the Arbcom's recusal policy when an Arbcom member has a conflict of interest. Right now the policy is overly vague and doesn't define what constitutes a conflict of interest. I posted some possible clarifying provisions here. Please review and comment. Rangerdude 01:16, 4 December 2005 (UTC)
How does one remove or "check" the message in the yellow box stating:
"Please check that the conditions given above are compliant with Wikipedia licensing policy..."
This message occurs on most of my image pages. They are all compliant.
Thanks!
-- Lensim 21:05, 3 December 2005 (UTC)
This page has a guideline
[1] on the article names for regular events like the Olympic Games and the Expo. But is guideline is not used in anyway. The given examples are red links, since there are not even redirects. I created a section on
Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (numbers and dates) to find a solution. --
Mkill 17:53, 3 December 2005 (UTC)
1 Not "guideline": proposal, as mentioned in wikipedia:current surveys#Discussions. See also Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (years in titles)/Poll. -- Francis Schonken 18:04, 3 December 2005 (UTC)
I removed a link to a user page from the “External links” section of Andreas Floer [5], but it was reverted [6]. Is this a valid link? Susvolans ⇔ 11:31, 3 December 2005 (UTC)
Well, is it? (No fair editing it to make it more serious, though.) Lubaf 06:56, 2 December 2005 (UTC)
I'd like to propose a policy with regard to user-space talk pages (specifically User_talk:xxxx). It seems to me that a user should not be able to simply delete content from talk pages unless it is truly vandalism. Case in point, these edits by Pigsonthewing (this user is currently up for RFAr, and has also had an RFC filed against him, both of which he has ignored or is ignoring) : [7] [8] (user removed warnings from his talk page, warnings that lead to him being banned for 48 hours) [9] [10] [11]. I realize this user is probably an extreme case, but these edits of his smack of revisionst history: an attempt to cover-up peoples opinions of him. Sure you can browse the history to try and find every point which the user removed content (content removed with an invalid, IMO, edit summary). But most users tend to archive their talk pages, not remove content they disagree with outright.
My proposal is simple: users should not remove content from their talk page unless it is to a) archive that content on a sub-page or b) remove a very limited definition of vandalism (to be discussed if this topic leads anywhere). Users should absolutely, and under no circumstances, remove warnings given by other editors unless it is to archive them. I do believe there should be a process where an administrator can intervene and remove content that abusive (or wrong, in the case of warnings), but I think it's silly that the kind of edits above are, as far as I know, within the rules/guidelines/policies of Wikipedia.
Opinions/thoughts? — Locke Cole (talk) (e-mail) 00:34, 23 November 2005 (UTC)
Is there a place to discuss Wikipedia accessibility?
A couple of editors suggested that text contrast in wikitable is insufficient. One editor pointed out that many elements in Wikipedia style share the same contrast and that we should not modify just one element.
I would like to discuss Wikipedia accessibility. Where is a good place? Bobblewik 10:02, 6 December 2005 (UTC)
Striver has been creating a great many new articles (as those of you who have listened to me kvetch undoubtedly know <g>). Until recently, he has been linking those articles to existing articles either in the text of the existing article (See XXX for further discussion) or adding links in the "See also" section. Recently, he has adopted another tactic. He inserts a notice at the START of an article saying that "This article is a sub-article of XXX". For examples, see:
Those are just a FEW of the articles he created or modified today using his Striver-defined hierarchical schema. (He's made 98 edits on December 5, by my count, and I'm not sure how many of those are new articles.)
I don't think one user should arrogate to himself the right to set up a hierarchy of articles without any discussion. Links and "see also" don't set up a hierarchy. Sub-article does. Please comment. Zora 09:30, 5 December 2005 (UTC)
Hi everyone. Im the guy Zora haves issues with. Regarding me renaming "Ulema", ill take that upp in the articles talk page.
I would be intrested to hear about some feedback regarding the idea of arraging article in a hierarchical. I asked for some comments here, but didnt get any.
The basic idea is that most articles can be put in a hirarcy. Of course this could lead to some border cases that could be difficult to agree on, but the great benefits i see in being able to see the articles in the context of more detailed sub-articles and less detailed parent articles outwheights the few border case difficulties this can lead to. It also makes it easier to find related topics and having a sense of where in the jungle of articles one is at the curent monent. Also, this takes further advantig of Wikipedia not a paper encyclopedia.
Being a
computer scienctis in the field of
Computer software I took my inspiration from
Object based
programming and
Inheritance (computer science).
I tweak't it a bit and came to a model suitable for Wikipedia. In Object Based Programming, Comunism could inherit from politics and Marxism.
In a Wikimodel of it, i divided articels to:
Sub-articles mention in the beginning of the aritlce what their "direct parent" is, and possibly also what their "parallel parent" or simple "parallel" article is.
Related articles are not mentioned in the beginning of the article, just mentined in the "see also" section.
"None related articles" are simply hypelinked to in the article text.
For example, Democracy and Comunism are both related articles, both being political models. Both are mentioned in the "see also" section of the other article. Alternativly, they could both be put in political models, and link to it as a parent-article.
Both Democracy and Comunism are sub-articles to
politics. Democracy is a "parallel sub-article" to
Majoritarianism, while
Comunism is a "parallel sub-article" to
Marxism.
"Majoritarianism" and "Marxism" are ideologies, while Democracy and Comunism are Form of governments, and "Form of governments" are not sub-sets to "ideologies". "Form of government" is in turn a sub-article to politics. Other sub-articles to "politics" include Economics (household managemen) and posibly Law.
Law enforcement being a "sub-article" to enforcement and a "parallel sub-article" to "Law", since "Law enforcement" is "enforcement" rather than "law". There are laws that are not "enforced" and "enforcement" is not a sub-set of "Law", one could "enforce" a unlawfull act, Chaos enforcement, that being a related article to "Law enforcment", and a "sub-article" to "enforcment"] and a "parallel sub-article" to "Chaos".
Of course there is no such words as "Chaos Enforcement", but the fact that the hirarcy leaded to that word shows how effective it is in categorisation. By tha way, "Chaos Enforcement" gave 23 google hits :P
"Politics" coul in turn be a sub-article to
Distribution and a "parallel sub-article" to
power.
History of democracy is a "sub-article" to history and a "parallel sub-article" to "democracy", since "History" is not a sub-set to "Form of government".
Comunist party is a sub-article to Politcial party and a "parallel sub-article" "Comunism".
I assured that 95% of the articles have one or several natural parent articles.
As a experiment, i created implemented it in Islamic scholars and its parallel article Islamic studies. I actually develped the idea as i worked with the articles, and now i have a finished and presentable proposal. Take a look at those two, and see how deep the sub-articles go, as deep as Islamic Banking and Wilayat al-Faqih, both tracable back to Islamic studies. I was very, very pleased with the solution, and the system made a very good job at showing what articles where missing and i needed to create to expand the hirarcy. For example, i discovered that there was no "Wilayat al-Faqih" while doing Islamic leadership.
i eagerly await feedback! Peace! -- Striver 16:58, 5 December 2005 (UTC)
Thax again for your feedback. Comments? --
Striver 20:32, 5 December 2005 (UTC)
Zora wrote:
Zora, what you are taliking about is "mulitple inheritance", something that was available already in C++. In it, you could have "Pegasus" inherit both "bird" and "Horse", getting both wings and hoves.
It looks like this:
I have no idea of what maid you think that i was proposing a single inheritance model, just look at what i sugested:
That one example inherites 4 (four) diferent parent articles, many of my examples gives multiple parent articles. By "parallel sub-articles" i meant things like a "Jesus" inheriting "pacifism", it cant be done logicly since "pacifism" is a ideology, not a human, less a physical object. That is the only reason i argued to use "parallel sub-articles". Otherwise even the "parallel" part can be droped.
Zora wrote:
Use W:NPOV. Is it NPOV to call him a leader? If yes, make it a sub-article to it. Repeat with "Israeli", "General" and "terrorist". My guess is that "terrorist" does not cutt NPOV.
I didnt plan on doing it to give everyone a nasty surprice, it was the intuitice result of trying to making sense of the mess that existed in the "Islamic scholar", "Islamic studies" and related article, until i figured out how to make it work.
Wahoofive wrote:
The advantage is in greater overview. Due to this, you can see a logical trace, like this:
This line is logical to follow, and gives a great sense of "where" you are in what we have otherwise: a jungle of random articles.
If you are searching for the information that is related to Islamic view of Christianity, and want to know if there is some related article to the Judaism view, you can simply clim the the hirarcy and look around, instead do wandering wheater the article exists, what it can be named and so on...
Try it! Go in to Islamic studies and see how great the feeling of having a good overview is! You can appreciated it without testing it!
Wahoofive wrote:
You are right, i hope to be able to share my experience with you. I doubt the previous method was like the one i propose, flexibility or neutrality is not an issue with this model, it only have advanteges. Yes true, you can come to roughly the same thing with the way we have now, but you will never get the same sense of overview without this proposal.
Bunchofgrapes wrote:
Brother, those things are not exclusive of eachoter. You can have both a great articel in a great categorised structure. About stubs, Wikipedia does have them for a reason. If there are lots of stubs created, that means that there are a need to fill them with information, Stubs are good, not bad :)
Deco wrote
And that is exactly what im talikng about! Linking up sub-articles to the parents!
Categories are great, and this is a in-between that makes it easier to get a quik overview.
You dont need to Link the "Islam" article to all its sub-articles, only to
Everything will be included in somewhere in in those three things, famous Muslims will go, for example
or
Of course, "Caliphs" not only a sub-article to "Muslim leaders" but also to, for example, "Famous leaders".
I mean look at this Islam#See_also, its a mess, it have no order what so ever. The See also of Islam now contains:
That is totaly random! It is much better to replace that with:
==Sub-articles==
And if anyone want to see about Christianity, the can just go to the parent article of Islam, "Relgion" and from there go to where they want. Isnt that much cleaere than the chaos that we have in many articles? Look at Christianity#See_also:
History and denominations:
Total anarchy! that could be replace with:
== Sub-articles ==
The choise is obvious IMHO :)
I mean, think if you are looking for "Christian views of men" and dont find it in the "see also", what to do? Make a search? In the proposed system, you just go to "Christian studies" and follow the subarticles, for example
Cant find it? Then you'll know that its not there, instead of it having some name you couldent gues or seach for :)
Deco wrote
And that is what i propose, multiple classification, and also being explicit and ordered about it :)
Rembeber, things have multible classification, so you can follow "Islamic banking" in any of this ways:
Hoping for more feedback!
-- Striver 04:28, 6 December 2005 (UTC)
Because Wikipedia's applied sourcing methodologies are not at academic levels across its content I will no longer be participating in this project. I have also pondered the thought that Wikipedia's internal group dynamics more resemble those of a charismatic religious (or political activist) organisation rather than a scholarly team writing an encyclopedia. Wyss 15:51, 19 November 2005 (UTC)
Wikipedia is a Meta Culture Blog Retrieved from " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Wyss"
Wikipedia is not a scholarly project and it will never be. If you want to read scholarly texts, read scientific magazines, or a scientific wiki. I fully appreciate the efforts of the academics here, and I am too trying to reduce the crap level, but unless we get all schools in every country to teach proper scholarly techniques, an encyclopedia that everyone can edit will always be like that. As for using Wikipedia for scholarly work: Don't. Note on troll percentage: Wikipedia is a Scale-free network, thus the percentage of academics and the percentage of no-brain-trolls will remain more or less constant no matter how much Wikipedia grows. Mkill 17:37, 3 December 2005 (UTC)
I have decided that I want to edit Wikipedia in the classic skin. This skin does not put a line under 2nd level headers, as the default skin does. However, I like the lines, so from now on everyone should insert an extra line above the 2nd level header so the articles look good for me.
---- ==Heading==
Thanks, Gerard Foley 01:52, 27 November 2005 (UTC)
I also edit in the classic skin, in no small part because I loathe those lines. If you really want them, though, put the following in User:Gmcfoley/standard.css:
h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6 { padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom: 1px solid #CCCCCC; } #article h1, #article h2, #article h3, #article h4, #article h5, #article h6 { margin-bottom: 0.3em; }
— Cryptic (talk) 23:38, 28 November 2005 (UTC)
Hi, thanks for the advice. I was not actually serious about this, it’s to do with a dispute over on Wiktionary, where this is common practice. I want these extra lines removed, however Hippietrail said we should wait for comments from Eclecticology because he edits in the classic skin. I just wanted to see how people would react to a request to add them here just because someone wants to edit in the classic skin. You can see the discussion at wikt:Wiktionary:Beer parlour#Four dashes. Gerard Foley 20:26, 30 November 2005 (UTC)
i have more than 3000 edits, see "user contributions" - i was blocked for no reason. User:Haham hanuka
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Can we please get a Guideline, if not a Policy, prohibiting the use of superfluous images? As I first noted at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Stub sorting#Images on stub templates starting to slow Wikipedia (again), the past few days it has started taking forever (often) to load images. Instead of throwing a bunch more money at upgrading hardware just to serve up tens of thousands of, at best, "nice to have" images, let's get of all superfluous images. The two main ones I think we should get rid of due to lack of utility are all images on Stub templates, and all images used in User Signatures. Other people may be able to think of other categories of images that we really don't need. Actually, all that are used somewhere other than the main Article Namespace should probably be carefully scrutinized as to whether they actually provide enough benefit to justify the (REAL $$$) cost. Niteowlneils 21:35, 10 November 2005 (UTC)
Hmmm, I think we need to actually see the numbers first, before deciding. Often site performance is somewhat counter-intuitive, especially with the wierd web of servers and proxies on multiple continents that wikipedia currently uses. Kim Bruning 23:43, 10 November 2005 (UTC)
This is silly. Niteowlneils, you started the Images on stub templates starting to slow Wikipedia (again) section; are you a developer? Do you have the server logs? Consider which pages are accessed before looking for scapegoats.
Wikipedia is the 38th most popular site on the internet. Where do all the anonymous visitors who make it that popular go? I suspect the main page is the heaviest contributor to server load, followed by the hundred most popular pages. These are all in the main namespace, and accesses to these pages probably dwarf talk page accesses by orders of magnitude. There are no signatures in the main namespace (except for articles signed by newbies). The most popular pages are not stubs. If the servers really are overloaded by images, and the slowness is not simply caused by a combination of your browser and connection (I haven't seen problems with images loading), why not start by taking the sister project images off the main page? ‣ᓛᖁ ᑐ 20:09, 12 November 2005 (UTC)
I am glad to see some people calling for actual numbers before such a decision is made, but discouraged that noone has provided such numbers and even more discouraged that discussion proceeds without obtaining those numbers.
Waterguy, here're the problems with your last sentence: you don't have evidence that umpteen megabytes of stub images are being served. While you have correctly asserted that there is a non-negative, non-zero cost involved in serving these images, you still have no evidence about the exact value or order of magnitude of that cost. So let me pose a scenario:
If stub images are causing 50% of the load on the image server, then eliminating stub images will eliminate 50% of the load and give us a 100% speedup. That would be spectacular! I would very much push for that, at least on a temporary basis. Perhaps even permanent.
But suppose stub images are causing 1% of the load on the image server. In that case, completely eliminating them will provide us only a 1% speedup. We will have effectively accomplished next to nothing, and it make take somebody all day to go make the change, too.
Quite possibly stub images are only 0.01% of the load. Neither you nor I actually know, do we? Yes, eliminating the stub images will definitely cause a speedup, no matter what. But you haven't yet proved that that speedup will not be simply negligible, so adamantly calling for this change doesn't make any sense, yet.
Can someone get some numbers? Percentage of images served broken down by the namespace of the page they are on, broken down by whether or not they are in a template, expressed as number of images served/number of actual connection attempts versus number of bytes served, showing how many images are being found in the cache, etc.? Without numbers this discussion is a relatively pointless brainstorming exercise. With numbers, we might see all kinds of other much more effective solutions. It might be apparent that the real thing to do is limit the size of the images by having their quality automatically scaled down. Or that we simply need to add RAM to the cache and retune it. Jdavidb ( talk • contribs) 21:02, 16 November 2005 (UTC)
Hard disk drives are the bottleneck. While stub images are small files, 1kB or less, they can have as much effect on server performance as large image files of several tens or hundreds of kilobytes. The reason is that the disk drives on which they are stored need to seek to the proper track, then wait for the disk to rotate to the proper sector (see latency). Head positioning takes orders of magnitude longer than reading the data and transmitting them to the requestor once the head is on track. Use of any images on Wikipedia should be done sparingly. Because there is such a tremendous variety of them, there is no practical way to cache all of them in solid-state memory. If using images everywhere is that important, the only practical way to solve the problem may be to move the most-requested ones to solid-state drives, which are very, very fast, but also very expensive. The system would also need to keep statistics on image file accesses in order to manage such caching. Unfortunately, mechanical hard disks have been leading solid-state memory down the price curve in cost-per-megabyte for decades, and there seems to be no end in sight yet. (Take it from someone who's worked in the hard disk drive industry since 1980.) -- Quicksilver T @ 19:00, 18 November 2005 (UTC)
There is currently a new proposal for a naming convention for articles about countries: Wikipedia:Naming conventions (countries). -- bainer ( talk) 00:05, 18 November 2005 (UTC)
I was surprised to find a large number of cricket articles (results of various matches), such as Sussex_v_Middlesex_4_July_2005 and Durham_v_Leicestershire_1_July_2005. How does this fit into Policy? Is this material part of an Encyclopedia? LoopZilla 09:43, 16 November 2005 (UTC)
The discussion whether it should be
OR
is still not concluded.
The first of these options equals the second, apart from: In the first option wikipedia:naming conventions (common names) is described as an exception to the names and titles NC guideline. The second option has the same content, only this option starts from the common names principle, providing solutions where that principle is not unambiguous. This way of putting it (that in practice does not lead to differences in page name all that often), is however better suited to link nobility naming conventions to the central ideas of wikipedia:naming conventions (people).
Someone thought it wise to hasten the discussion by listing the "Western nobility" NC guideline at MfD, see Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:Naming conventions (Western nobility)
Anyway, both options are discussed at Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (names and titles)#proposed tag, that's where I would group the discussion.
-- Francis Schonken 10:00, 20 November 2005 (UTC)
I know we've decided against hosting mp3s at Wikipedia. However, Let It Be... Naked has something a little different: hotlinks to WalMart mp3 samples. I'm guessing this is at least against policy. Deltabeignet 07:34, 20 November 2005 (UTC)
I have found that Special:Deadendpages and Special:Lonelypages have several candidates ripe for deletion under WP:CV and WP:AFD, however these are not updated regularly. Also, the lists as they stand are arranged alphabetically but only the first 1000 entries are available as the report. It means that articles starting with alphabet D onwards would almost not find any mention. The associated talkpages for these 2 pages are largely inactive. -- Gurubrahma 13:40, 14 November 2005 (UTC)
I wonder if someone could tell me if there is a policy about using one photograph in more than one article? I have posted a couple of photographs which I thought were pertinent to two entries - but it occurred to me that this may be a "no-no". Please let me know if this practice is discouraged, or whether it is O.K.
Many thanks,
John Hill John Hill 00:55, 21 November 2005 (UTC)
A new proposal on the representation of Norse mythology names is now up for a vote. - Haukur Þorgeirsson 00:51, 19 November 2005 (UTC)
Why is someone is creating articles like January 21, 2003? If it's to split the January 21 and the 2003 article, I don't think it is right. The years and and the months pages are after all articles that waits to be expanded. There's no need to create an encyclopedic article for every day in the year. I propose they all be deleted and merged back to their original article, regarading that this step hasn't been discussed before. CG 18:23, 13 November 2005 (UTC)
First, I would like to say that when I first started on Wikipedia I was very supportive of the current policy of allowing anonymous users to edit articles, but as I have become more active in improving articles I am frustrated by the constant vandalism I see. It is almost always anonymous users who do this. Please do NOT refer to me to Perennial proposals I have already given my thoughts on that page nobody looks at it anyway. I'm sick of anonymous users vandalism, and I think the benefits far outweigh the possible drawbacks. of course there are some good anonymous users in that mess of trolls & vandals, but most of the serious wikipedians have registered already. I'm feeling very angry, because I feel there is nothing I can do to change the policy. I am writing this here as a demand for a change in the policy to a policy where one must register to edit articles, nothing more, nothing less. -- Revolución ( talk) 02:54, 7 November 2005 (UTC)
I think it would be good to stop anonymous users from creating new articles, or at least having them go through moderation. Anonymous users are responsible for almost all of the non-image copyright violations on Wikipedia and they are usually on pages that the user has created. Also, anonymous users create almost all of the articles speedily deleted and a substantial number of the articles deleted at Articles for Deletion. It's relatively easy to revert a bad edit, but it's much more time consuming to have an article go through the deletion process on Copyright Problems or Articles for Deletion.
One of the difficulties with making these changes is that many editors have a doomsday prediction about what will happen if the rules are changed. We can make the change temporary and revert if it causes problems. -- Kjkolb 00:09, 11 November 2005 (UTC)
Are there any statistics available on the contributions of logged-in vs. not-logged-in edits with respect to numbers in the several dimensions of a) sheer volume, b) edits per article, c) article creations, d) proportion of edits per article on those created by logged-in users, e) proportion of edits per article on those created by not-logged-in users? Looking at these numbers together might provide a better picture of the contributions of each editor group rather than relying on anecdotal evidence (though I believe in the anecdotal conclusion of their being largely positive and concur based on my own personal experience). Thanks for considering this .. perhaps someone who has experience in SQL access to the database could run a few queries, put the results in a page in the Wikipedia namespace in the Category:Wikipedia statistics. Courtland 00:42, 12 November 2005 (UTC)
I share Revolución's frustration. In cases of page vandalism, I frequently check the contributions of non-registered users (IP address only). In most cases, if that IP address vandalized one page, all the rest of the contributions from that IP address are garbage, too. However, what if the user is sitting at a terminal in his/her public library? In one instance the input is garbage, in another it's great stuff, because a different person is using the terminal. For this reason it's making me rethink whether there's any point to posting warnings to the talk pages of non-registered users. The non-registered users may not even be familiar enough with Wikipedia to realize that they have a talk page, and may thus never see any warnings posted to the IP address they're using. Moreover, with dynamic IP address assignment, a vandal could be wandering around town with his notebook computer and logging in through WiFi hotspots, getting a different IP address each time. Since creating an account on Wikipedia is so easy, forcing users to log in before letting them edit is only a slight inconvenience to determined vandals, who'll gladly create any number of gibberish user names to do what they did with just an IP address the day before. I suspect the only thing that dissuades vandals from continuing is that they guess that something is afoot when they vandalize a page and revisit it a few days later to find their handiwork gone, and eventually just give up when it happens repeatedly. -- Quicksilver T @ 19:36, 18 November 2005 (UTC)
Being quite new to Wikipedia, I have yet to run into the problem Rick (as well as many others) has experienced with vandalism (although, I hardly look forward to the day when it'll occur to the articles I've contributed to). Perhaps some mechanisms could be put into place to specifically handle the vandalism problem. Articles could allow anonymous posting, and in the event vandalism occurs, the article could be locked so only registered users could make edits. I'm as idealistic as the next person with regards to anonymous editors, but as usual, the few bad apples ruin the bunch for everyone. -- BrandonG 03:12, 21 November 2005 (UTC)
Recently there has been some discussion among mathematically-inclined editors on the make technical articles accessible policy. I would like to invite the broader Wikipedia community to help us sort this out. My position is that we must start to recognise that Wikipedia has moved beyond a general-audience encyclopaedia, and now serves specialist communities as well. The policy needs to change to reflect this.
For example, this morning I found a "too technical" tag placed on the article class field theory. Of course I agree that the article is too technical for most readers to understand. But sorry — that's just the way it is. I'm a PhD student studying algebraic number theory (the area of mathematics in which class field theory lives) and I myself have trouble really understanding what class field theory is all about. In fact, the current Wikipedia article on class field theory is far less technical than any other description I have seen before.
The difficulty is this: class field theory is about certain things called abelian field extensions. The author is not trying to be fancy or trying to impress anyone by using the technical terms "abelian" and "field extension". Unfortunately, it just isn't possible to simplify anything by using less technical terms. If you haven't ever done time studying Galois theory (which includes practically the entire "general audience"), then you simply can't make sense of these terms. It's not something you can just pick up in an idle afternoon.
The aims of make technical articles accessible are admirable. I certainly agree that articles should be made as accessible as possible. But a line has to be drawn somewhere. Dmharvey File:User dmharvey sig.png Talk 18:53, 11 November 2005 (UTC)
One requests to people who put the {{ technical}} template. Please take some time to explain either on the talk page or in the edit summary what exactly you think is a problem, and if possible suggestions for its improvement. It is not right for a person to just take a look at an article, say "Gosh, what is that?", put a technical template and walk away. First, the tag might not be justfified, and second, the article authors might sincerely believe that the article is already acessible enough, and your insight might be very valuable. Oleg Alexandrov ( talk) 23:50, 11 November 2005 (UTC)
It is with some sadness that I watch a trend of anti-intellectualism grow with pages tagged with the {tl|technical}} template or with comments appended to talk pages describing the contents of academic pages as "gibberish" simply because they use the jargon of the subject area (even though extensively linked to explanatory pages). I might agree with the spirit of what Shimgray says, i.e. that there is sometimes a need for technical articles to be translated into lay language. It serves the purpose of making basic concepts more accessible to those without the academic background. I speculate that the success of the [Enter subject] for Dummies series of books profitably serves this need. However, when a specialist writes a page for other specialists, whether it be in science, mathematics, law, philosophy, or baseball, it is appropriate to use the jargon and expertise of that specialism (appropriately linked to explanatory pages for those who want to understand more). If this is arguing the case for a two-tier forking of pages into technical and introductory, then so be it. Those who wish to make sometimes abstruse material more comprehensible can provide a translation service where access to the content will serve a public good. But let us all have a little more respect for those editors with the drive to write pages on the Wikipedia, no matter what their intended market. So, to clarify my response to this topic as titled, it is the mere appending of non-constructive comments and general unwillingness to co-operate in the building of consensus material that is deeply frustrating. If those who object to pages had the humility to frankly admit what is not understood so that remedial action could be taken, accessibility could slowly evolve. But it seems that there is too much fear and insecurity in the world for this to happen. David91 05:10, 13 November 2005 (UTC)
I agree that class field theory is probably never going to be accessible to an average non-mathematician, but I do think that there is a certain elitism involved in not even parenthetically explaining that "abelian" in this context means "commutative", a word known to all who study mathematics, and not just to algebraists. It should be possible to write this article so that an average third-year undergraduate in mathematics could read it. -- Jmabel | Talk 21:11, 13 November 2005 (UTC)
The technical template currently encourages people to add non-technical explanations without removing the technical material. I don't see why this is a problem. I recently put a technical tag on atenolol, a drug that I take. A few months ago, I understood everything in the article. Now, I only understand the things that I pulled out of the edit history after the non-technical explanation was erased. Wikipedia is for everyone — experts and non-experts alike. And so we should include information for both groups, not deleting one kind of information or the other. /soapbox Jacqui ★ 05:05, 22 November 2005 (UTC)
Hello, I was having a debate at Talk:Moscow with some posters who want to glide over the problems or the unpleasant aspects of Moscow, when after arguing for inclusion I realised, on looking around, that most of the articles on cities try to present a sort of tourist agency view on everything. Sure, the best aspects of each city need emphasis, but I think it's extremely deceptive to talk about large cities without mentioning the problems they face. I just noticed for instance that London makes no mention of the squalor that is visible in many parts of the city and which has been one of its major attributes for ages - in the past two centuries alone these depressing parts of London, or the experiences from within, have given rise to many of the great works of sociology, literature and so on. I think there needs to be a change in the approach to writing such articles - apart from mentioning all the wonderful museums, galleries and other tourist spots, there needs to be some perspective offered to the curious reader, not just the kind of information that any tourist brochure or guidebook will give you; in fact, even some travel books are more honest about the areas to avoid, among other things, than Wikipedia is! Of course, every large city has more or less the same kinds of problems. But they all manifest themselves in different ways and to different degrees; corruption for instance is a problem in every part of the world, but it is much more widespread or common at lower levels in certain cities than others; squalor is also visible in every major American or English city, but to a much greater extent than in other industrialized nations like Canada and Australia; housing projects are extremely common now but they are much more numerous - in fact overwhelming and depressing - in, say, South American cities like Sao Paulo, than the ones outside Vienna or Frankfurt; public transport in London is shockingly overpriced and a lot less reliable compared to the equally extensive public transport in Moscow. Not everyone who lives in a big city is necessarily a middle-class, median income, lifelong resident, and the majority of those who aren't face a lot of difficulties, and so would an independent, budget traveller. These articles need to be more rounded out to reflect actual life in these cities, not just a listing of popular spots, and I'd like to see some guidelines to this end. -- Simonides 00:11, 15 November 2005 (UTC)
First, thank you all for the responses.
Second, David, I don't know and can't say whether your own edits are due to a certain allegiance (we all have our own), but I agree with you fully on the general kinds of problems editors face here. At least, it is one of the two most serious problems on Wikipedia - 1) POV pushing and systemic bias (which User:Xed has written about eloquently and which I used to keep pointing out, in different words, before he joined); ie the lapse into a default, parochial perspective on all non-Anglophone topics, and 2) seriously dumb edits by people who, for whatever reason, will argue the same point over and over and keep reverting without actually taking any effort to read the article, read the Talk page, check any facts, correct themselves, present any genuine arguments, and so on. Often the two habits go together. It's more serious than vandalism in my opinion, because vandalism rarely amounts to circuitous rhetoric, and will not have supporters among the admin and other users, who keep popping by to 'correct' or 'NPOV' the issue - in their favour. On a more optimistic note, there are some bright minds here too, and sometimes either the latter take charge or some people finally see the light of day, so if you keep holding your ground, the majority of non-aligned editors will finally see the value of your position and defend it. Case in point - a year ago, before I quit WP (I was hoping permanently - sigh) I kept pointing out the irritating Americentrism of all the News and Current Events page and drafting guidelines everyone ignored or voted against. After a lot of heated arguments and risks of banning, someone finally turned things around while I was away. -- Simonides 13:02, 23 November 2005 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Article_point_of_view_vs_NPOV is a proposed amendment to the policy on Neutral Point of View, as applied to articles that describe a specific point of view. -- Iantresman 14:29, 24 November 2005 (UTC)
Don't know if this is the right section. User:CalJW wants to convert Category:Philippine sites to Category:Landmarks_in_the_Philippines . [ See here]. His previous proposal was tourist attraction.
He also wants to delete Category: Places in Cuba. For some reason , places and locations are ambigous to him.
CalJW has done a laudable and respectable job converting and creating categories, however, I've done a lot of work on categories in the Philippines and I think a places or locations categories are needed which he feels are not.
Wikipedia is not a tourism site! There are Category:Star Wars locations, Category:Bible places, Category:New Testament places and Category:Torah places. I don't see anything vague with the meaning of place. Buildings and places have totally different meanings. -- Jondel 07:33, 24 November 2005 (UTC)
The whole speedy deletion thing has become utterly over- nomic-ed with CSD, let's get rid of it!
Kim Bruning 01:06, 24 November 2005 (UTC)
On Wikipedia talk:What Wikipedia is not#Proposal to modify WP:NOT an image gallery, I proposed the following change to this policy:
I propose we change this to:
Following general agreement to the principles behind the change amongst participants on that talk page, and three explicit messages of support for the proposed change, I made the change, which has been criticised later on WP:VFD by User:Splash (who raised no concrete objections to the change, but objected to the manner in which the change to policy was executed), and User:Aaron Brenneman reversed the change asserting that the change requires more input.
Observe that several galleries have survived well-participated AfDs, eg. Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Gallery of illuminated manuscript images.
Please participate in this discussion! --- Charles Stewart 00:44, 24 November 2005 (UTC)
I have seen quite a few editors leave wikipedia because of the soft approach to vandalism. Why do serial and blatant vandals get such soft warnings such as the one below:
Thanks for experimenting with Wikipedia. Your test worked, and has been reverted or removed. Please use the sandbox for any other tests you want to do. Take a look at the welcome page if you would like to learn more about contributing to our encyclopedia. Thanks.
The above template is currently the standard warning for examples of vandalism such as Amy is extremely ugly !!!!! and worse. This is obviously not a test, or a user experimenting with wikipedia. These are examples of malicious editing and I think it is silly to suggest such a user experiment in the sandbox. One strike and you're out should be standard policy for this type of vandalism not the five or so warning that seem to be the current norm. David D. (Talk) 16:50, 9 November 2005 (UTC)
Please do not add gossip to wikipedia. Take a look at the welcome page if you would like to learn more about contributing to our encyclopedia. Thanks.
To be honest test mostly says that we saw that. Most vandels stop as soon as they relise they have been spoted. Geni 23:13, 9 November 2005 (UTC)
Hi
I've just created a very short proposal at Wikipedia:Be cautious. Now I'm going to get under the desk for a while. Filiocht | The kettle's on 11:55, 25 November 2005 (UTC)
Do we have a policy yet on the placing of portal links?
Now on the whole I think portals (as found in Category:Portals) are a very good thing. They help readers explore a subject and they help stimulate editors to expand articles and round out subject areas. However, the placement of portal link templates on articles seems to be somewhat random and inconsistent. Contrast these examples;
To my mind, portal links are rather similar to the links to sister projects and so the Canada article has the best placement. I would also argue that anything that is not about the article itself should not detract from the content of the article.
I think there have been a number of mild conflicts over this sort of thing in the past. The situtation often seems to be similar to editors who like to place navigation boxes at the top or top right of related page. Some of the issues verge on spam linking, where the creators of a new portal want as many people as possible to see the new portal and so add links to as many articles as possible, as prominently as possible. -- Solipsist 07:43, 25 November 2005 (UTC)
There's a proposal at Wikipedia_talk:Verifiability#References_title_misread_as_non-web_External_links to change the References header to "Sources", and External links to "Further reading". So far, the proposal has been accepted by all the editors on the page, but because this is a policy page, I'm putting it here for further discussion before changing it.
The reason for the proposal is that using "References" and "External links" is confusing. Sources are supposed to be listed under References, and any further reading is listed under Further reading or External links. But many editors think that any external links, whether used as sources or not, should go under External links, so then they list any material that isn't online, like books, under References, even if not used as a source. To cut through all this confusion, the proposal is to change the headers to Sources and Further reading, which are self-explanatory, and don't make the online/offline distinction. Comments would be welcomed. SlimVirgin (talk) 21:53, 25 November 2005 (UTC)
Agree to change
Oppose
There are many articles about countries' relations, but with great differences between their titles:
The only stable format that is used is with relations with the United Nations (see Category:United Nations relations)
Anyway there should be a naming convention about these kind of articles. CG 15:01, 27 November 2005 (UTC)
We currently have a debate at wikt:Wiktionary:Beer parlour#Neat icons about weather or not to start to include small icons as they do in the French Wiktionary. Most people seem to think that these icons will have a detrimental effect on the loading of pages. I believe that this is a misguided view caused by their lack of experience with using pictures. I would appreciate if people can leave comments there and perhaps vote as Wikipedia users have more experience using pictures then Wiktionary users do. Gerard Foley 00:47, 27 November 2005 (UTC)
I'm surprised how few people actually know that there isn't going to be an open arbcom election this year, so I'd mention this here as well. Jimbo has announced he will hand-pick new ArbCom candidates rather than have an open election for them, then have the public vote on his selections, with 50% support required to pass. See Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee Elections December 2005/Straw poll. R adiant _>|< 20:22, 26 November 2005 (UTC)
Dear fellow Wikipedians, here is the solution to Wikipedia's problem: Wikipedia:Requests for publication -- Zondor 17:12, 26 November 2005 (UTC)
I propose the following policy for handling April Fools Day:
The intent of the policy is to (a) streamline the correction of April Fools pranks, (b) maintain core wikipedia functionality on April Fools Day, (c) redirect the efforts of April Fools pranksters to higher quality & more interesting pranks, (d) allow wikified preperation of pranks ahead of time, and (e) maintain goodwill between everyone. Actually, we don't even need the scripts really, we could just say that pranks will only be permitted if they follow the /NotAprilFools and {{AprilFools}} guidlines. I just thought the scripts kept it cleaner. Thoughts? - JeffBurdges 15:19, 22 November 2005 (UTC)
Maybe we should consider implementing such rules by appeal to the better nature of wikipedian interested in general article? If Rick Block is right that few people would follow the policy, we could try the following:
Thoughts? Does anyone have something they would like to see in an April Fools policy which this does not provide? - JeffBurdges 01:23, 23 November 2005 (UTC)
November 2005 (UTC)
One technical measure of which I would approve is a lock on the MediaWiki namespace for the day. Messing about with the site interface is, in my opinion, going a bit too far. — Dan | Talk 03:59, 23 November 2005 (UTC)
What do we need special policy for? The normal rules apply. Geni 04:32, 23 November 2005 (UTC)
Alright, it seems wikipedia has plenty of humorless snobs, just made Template:AprilFools and its allready been nominated for deletion. :) Here is the code of my suggested template: :<div class="boilerplate" id="AprilFools">''April Fools! The [[{{NAMESPACE}}:{{PAGENAME}}/NotAprilFools|original article]] will be back tomarrow.''</div>
There was a discussion on the mailing list the day before this year's April Fools that seemed to be gaining some steam (including some praise from Jimbo himself), but probably came too late. In keeping the fun of April Fools with the desire to present legitimate information in a responsible way, we should actually present real articles that seem a little "out of place". One or more unusual articles can be brought up to FA standard, and a few unusual or unbelievable pieces of trivia (or maybe the truth reworded to sound unbelievable). People reading the main page would be absolutely convinced that these articles are false and an April Fools joke, but the joke's on them! These articles are real and true! For an article to be brought up to FA status, an article like exploding whale (which is already FA, so it can't be used again) or any currently non-FAs in Wikipedia:Unusual articles could be done. That would be the FA for the day. The "previous FAs" could link to exploding whale and other unusual articles that were already FA and therefore can't be used for 2006. Examples of facts presented in an unbelievable way can include the fact that Queen Elizabeth II was once a driver and changed the wheel of a lorry when she was younger (see here, and we could include the picture on the front page too with a modified caption, like "Princess Elizabeth changes the wheel of a lorry during her stint as a driver"). This takes some work, so I think work on this should start early, maybe a month before April Fools. -- D e ath phoenix 14:37, 23 November 2005 (UTC)
Creating one or two good April Fool's articles is one thing, but this last April 1st things went beyond that, with edit warring on the Main Page, blocks and unblocks of admins, editing of the tabs in the MediaWiki namespace, name-calling, etc. It was all rather juvenile in my opinion. If that happens again in 2006, every admin involved should be RFC'd and then RFAR'd for abuse of admin priviledges. Blank Verse 14:41, 23 November 2005 (UTC)
I instead propose that we impose a one-week ban on people who knowingly deface the encyclopedia in the name of fun on April Fools. You want to do april fools? Celebrate it someplace else. It's stupid to waste developer time to make it easy to be an idiot, and it's stupid that other people should need to clean up the mess. It'd be sad if necessary, but if need be the entire wikipedia should perhaps be locked on that day to stop people who should know better. -- Improv 16:13, 23 November 2005 (UTC)
I am completely in favor of doing something that looks like an April Fool's prank but isn't.
I am opposed to tolerating real April Fool's pranks and would happily support locking the whole wikipedia for a day if that's what's required to deal with it.
April Fool's pranks are fun if the audience eventually "gets it." Unfortunately history shows that many people do not get this kind of humor no matter how broad it is. Even if it says "April Fool" in so many words at the bottom of the page, people don't necessarily read to the end.
April Fool articles are one thing in a publication like Datamation (hah! that's a good test of how old you are), because there is reason to believe the editors know their audience (and can gauge the credulity level appropriately). They are something else in a publication with as wide a readership as Wikipedia. Even Technology Review once ran an April Fool's piece that was picked up as real by the news media.
For an encyclopedia to intentionally disseminate inaccurate information isn't funny. Or, as they used to say in L'il Abner (another age test) "If thas' a joke, Ah fails to see th' hoomor in it. Or: "tain't funny, McGee!" (Now, that one IS before my time...) Dpbsmith (talk) 16:53, 23 November 2005 (UTC)
Should people actually want a technical solution, like locking wikipedia, a solution less likely to bring on more trolls would be hosting a locked copy on en.locked.wikipedia.org, with links to it from every page. Not a very wiki solution really, but workable. JeffBurdges 17:23, 23 November 2005 (UTC)
I think we could use some guidance here. Soccer fans had been referring to their sport as "football" on Current sports events, despite the mentions of several other types of "football" games on the page. I was under the impression that the compromise term " football (soccer)" had been created to be used in potentially ambiguous or controversial situations. I changed all of the "football" references to "football (soccer)" and put a note on the talk page asking people to use the latter term in the future. A British user objected and changed all the references back. He said soccer is the world game, the true football, etc., etc. and could not be convinced to use the compromise term. So I put a note on Wikipedia:Wikiquette alerts. After doing so, three more British people came to talk:Current sports events and, rather than lecturing the "football" guy for breaking what I thought was Wikipedia practice, supported him. Then an American came to the article page and changed all the "football" references to "soccer," screwing up all the wikilinks in the process.
How can we avoid revert wars and another tedious American English vs. British English argument? -- Mwalcoff 23:49, 15 November 2005 (UTC)
Another option is to go with "dribbling sport" as described by the RFU museum Year 1863 ;-)
-- Philip Baird Shearer 23:53, 20 November 2005 (UTC)
This subject rugger soccer etc is described on the Football page and is done to death in the archives ( Talk:Football). I think I have read all the points made here apart from the one about "European football". What does that make the Six Nations Championship? Perhapse Kiwi football :-( -- Philip Baird Shearer 00:06, 21 November 2005 (UTC)
I'm a few days late on this, but there's nothing about this issue that's unique to football (soccer). Be clear in your writing—if a term is ambiguous and not clear in context (as when referencing one of three popular sports on the Main Page, or on first reference in an article), spell it out. As an American, I would never simply write "soccer" knowing that it's a term unfamiliar to a non-trivial segment of my audience. I know the sport's capable of inciting riots in other parts of the world, but jingoism has no place in NPOV writing. Austin Hair ✍ ✉ 02:18, 27 November 2005 (UTC)
In response to the overwhelming level of vandalism at George W. Bush, a few users have proposed a better set of tools to use to combat vandalism, without resorting to the anti-wiki full protect; See Wikipedia:Semi-protection policy - Mys e ku rity 05:38, 29 November 2005 (UTC)
After 2 msgs 12 minutes apart, an editor added A9 to CSD. I can't tell whether the following response might have been intended sarcastically:
but in any case i am so far the only nay-sayer. We have gotten along without A9 for nearly 5 years, and the idea of introducing a new excuse for immediate deletion in this fashion is outrageous. I removed A9, tho i'm not sure there is any harm in it. There is definite harm in using this kind of shoot-from-the-hip process to authorize immediate deletion.
--
Jerzy•
t 18:46, 28 November 2005 (UTC)
Oh, sorry, that discussion is at
Wikipedia talk:Criteria for speedy deletion#Unneeded disambig pages.
--
Jerzy•
t 18:49, 28 November 2005 (UTC)
This issue is actually about moving a page to its proper name, which can be done through WP:RM (more discussion on talk page). Demi T/ C 00:29, 29 November 2005 (UTC)
Friday and Saturday night, I was editing Wikipedia and encountered "the datbase is locked" conditions. Is this something that happened automatically, or is somebody locking the database? If it's being done by a person, could they give us some warning? How long does this database locked condition normally last? User:Zoe| (talk) 03:12, 28 November 2005 (UTC)
I have created a proposal which would allow the use of non-free images in special cases outside the encyclopedia. See Wikipedia:Licensing for community images; comments welcome. Thue | talk 17:04, 21 November 2005 (UTC)
The Cambridge Union Society is obviously notable, because of its age and past members, but how are the current or recent officers of any interest to anyone outside the society itself? A recently added article on a student society is that on the Oxford Law Society, "famous within Oxford due to its reputation for hosting large free parties and quality balls" (is it famous for anything else?), which has a long list of current committee members, but nothing on history or anything else of more general interest.
We should have some guidelines on student societies in general (as current deletion policy seem to be very inconsistent), but also on what to include in such articles, when the notability of the society itself is not in question. Former active members who have gone on to do notable things should be included, as it helps establish the notability of the society. Current or very recent elected officers should definitely be left out, unless there are exceptional reasons to include any such individual. Tupsharru 10:19, 21 November 2005 (UTC)
List of U.S. Presidential pets - Is this notable? Even if I were to accept the need for a list, I'd feel that having separate articles such as Socks (cat) may be uncalled for. I am saying this because articles such as Arabella Kennedy were deleted. I don't know if there is a policy, but I thought it'd be safe to ask here. -- Gurubrahma 05:55, 28 November 2005 (UTC)
There has been a debate on the Lyrebird article page, where an editor keeps taking information about Australian folklore, dating back to the late 1800's with regard to lyrebirds, and transferring the information to the Talk:Lyrebird because there is no given source to go with the folklore comment.
I feel that the information should be on the main article, and not just 'tucked away' on the discussion page, where people who may be interested may not be able to find it. Folkfore is handed down from generation to generation by 'word of mouth' and, as such, deserves its place on the main article, irrespective of whether, or not, there is a verifiable source for the information.
Could I please have input by other Wikipedians about this. Thank you. Figaro 14:53, 25 November 2005 (UTC)
I am currently in an edit war on Robert De Niro. Certain users keep trying to change American to Italian American. Personally I think it is wrong to include ethnic identifiers in the headers as this is not done in other good encyclopedias like Britannica, mainly because often is not entirely accurate. I am not against mentioning that De Niro identifies as an Italian American in an article, just not in the header. There was also a similar problem in the Leonard Nimoy and Alicia Silverstone article with people replacing American with Jewish American, probably with many other bios also. Is there any kind of guideline that would support my stance here or should I apply to create one? Arniep 20:07, 12 November 2005 (UTC)
I agree that nationality rather than ethnicity or religion is appropriate for the header. Many people though, think of someone's "nation" as the group that they belong to, not the state in which they live. We here in the United States of America don't usually make the distinction, but in Moscow for instance if you ask someone their nationality, the response might be Russian, or Jewish. My point is that the word "Nationality" really has more than one meaning. In most biographies, I would consider someone's religion, or ethnic background to be of secondary interest. I generally don't even mention someone's religion unless they are a religious leader or somesuch. Morris 20:57, 12 November 2005 (UTC)
I think this really varies. It would be very odd not to mention in the lead that Booker T. Washington was African American or that Abraham Goldfaden was Jewish. But country should be there, too. -- Jmabel | Talk 21:15, 13 November 2005 (UTC)
I think that in most cases, it's inappropriate to put someone's ethnicity in the header. This came up with Paul Wolfowitz, which originally had his Jewish ethnicity in the lead paragraph. I said that there's no reason to include that unless we call Jeff Halpern a Jewish-American hockey player, Adam Horovitz a Jewish-American musician, etc.
That said, there are some cases in which ethnicity might be relevant in the first paragraph. One instance would be if the ethnicity is essential to the person's notability. It probably makes sense to call Rosa Parks an African-American civil-rights activist. Another case might be when the relationship between ethnicity and nationality is unclear. For example, medeival traveler Ibrahim ibn Jakub was, as the Polish Wikipedia calls him, a Jew of Arab origin from Spain. Nowadays, we'd just call someone from Spain a Spaniard no matter what his religion or ethnicity, but to call ibn Jakub simply a Spaniard would be confusing. -- Mwalcoff 05:18, 16 November 2005 (UTC)
Kim's on of the most on the ball Wikipedians I know, and I want to shuck my policymaking newcomer tag and help Kim in her crusade against outdated policies. Here's my ideas, let me know what you think. karmafist 18:51, 29 November 2005 (UTC)
This would replace our now ambiguous and frustrating policy creation process.
Anyone interested in this sort of thing might want to take a look at how the Wikipedia:Notability and Music Guidelines, which did not make it as policy, are being snuck into the Wikipedia:Criteria for speedy deletion rules. Strangely, no one there wants to put this to a vote... Trollderella 18:47, 29 November 2005 (UTC)
Ok, so technically it's winter. :-P
Policy has become all crufty and stuck, so I thought I'd try some policy spring cleaning. However, my initial efforts with broom, mop and featherduster are going really slowly. Guidelines somehow seem to bounce off each other and bounce right back, so I'm going to need some help cleaning 'em up, and basically cutting down on our rulecruft.
Note that I've earlier already gone and successfully did stuff like WP:SR, WP:TRI and WP:5P, so how hard can it get? Hmm, well pretty hard. "But but but *MY* guidelines are good, you should deprecate THOSE guidelines over there instead", and then there's delaying tactics, and stalling, and "gosh but that policy has been consensus since my uncle mortimer died in 1903" Ahuh, right... Okay....
What we need is cooperation, and tactics to gently pry people away from their comfortable blankets rules for a minute, so we can put them through a spin-cycle. (the rules that is, not the people ... well maybe the people too O:-) ) . My best effort on formulating tactics to-date is
here.
So fair deal, I need some help here. And I hardly dare ask, we couldn't, couldn't maybe get a consensus for a guidelines-freeze while we tidy stuff, could we?
Kim Bruning 17:13, 29 November 2005 (UTC)
I removed a link to a reference source of a New York times article posted in a forum on the web. Not sure of the policy, but I assume that wikipedia does not want to link to pages like that? Please discuss at the articles talk page. Gary_Stochl and talk:Gary_Stochl also how do I link to the reference, do I link to New York times web site that requires payment or not? Stefan 12:09, 28 November 2005 (UTC)
I have put a proposal Wikipedia talk:Ethno-cultural labels in biographies. Please edit and discuss abakharev 12:55, 2 December 2005 (UTC)
There's a recently introduced new feature called "Article validation" to make wikipedia more reliable, which will go live "very soon". I don't feel that "rating an article" is the correct approach. You're welcome to read the reasoning and discuss here: [3]. Cheers! Peter S. 12:42, 2 December 2005 (UTC)
I have started going through Special:UncategorizedCategories, and I've come upon this: Category:Animal liberation. It's a redirect to Category:Animal liberation movement, and so it shows up itself as empty and orphaned. Is this kind of category redirect a standard practice, or is it something that should be handled in some other way? -- SCZenz 22:05, 30 November 2005 (UTC)
In the article on the dubiously noteworthy Debra Lafave, someone (an IP, from today a username) as been repeatedly adding to the list of external links groups.yahoo.com/group/Debra_Lafave/, billing this as "Debra Lafave news and discussion". The opening page tells us that it's For fans of Debra Lafave, the sexiest ex-middle-school teacher on earth! [snip snip snip] So, without further adue, [sic] we present the life of Debra told in pictures.
Well actually they don't, because that's "Members Only". (And I for one am not letting my member get anywhere near it.)
To Locke Cole and myself, this looks like spamming a link that's inherently unencyclopedic:
But Locke and I don't want to be rapped over the knuckles by 3RR. Plus I'm not sure I'm Doing The Right Thing: I've gradually become aware that a great amount of what I regard as blather, trivia, fancruft, gossip, speculation, etc., is regarded as worthy encyclopedia content by lots of WP editors in good standing. So what say? -- Hoary 10:09, 29 November 2005 (UTC)
As part of work that has arisen on the talk page for WP:NPOV, I ended up trying to summarize in one sentence, what exactly Wikipedia is, in a way that shows exactly how NPOV, CITE, VERIFY and other major principles fitted in and were integral to it rather than arbitrary choices. This is what I came up with: User:FT2/ABOUT
My intent is to define Wikipedia concisely and precisely in under 10 words, in a way that clarifies why certain policies exist and work as they do, and the precise aim of Wikipedia in its approach to summarizing human knowledge. In doing so, it also shows that other core policies are not arbitrarily chosen, how they fit together as a coherent whole, and the reasons for these stated policies and principles.
Please review and discuss if it is useful. Does it have a place or use anywhere?
FT2 03:05, 3 December 2005 (UTC)
I added a merge tag on Monday at United Kingdom. I added it in good faith. There is a live discussion which seems to contain no hostility. Unfortunately the tag keeps being removed. Some people have removed but have not said they have. Some have commented, for example discussion has petered out but that was only 2 hours after the last comment. As of now, the discussion on the talk page has not mentioned the tag itself.
I am not a big fan of tags but I can tolerate one for three days during a live debate. I thought the whole point of a tag is so that readers can see it and join the ongoing debate. Please can others comment? Bobblewik 00:53, 2 December 2005 (UTC)
Sorry if this has been asked before, but I was just wondering if bands are supposed to be reffered to as a singluar object or a group. eg, "The Beatles is a band..." or "The Beatles are a band..." Thanks. SaltyWater 13:46, 1 December 2005 (UTC)
I have a related question. Which tense should be used when referring to now-defunct bands? Does the band as a concept keep existing in present tense even though they quit playing together years ago? And people, too. "Foo is an Australian musician who lived from 1900-1951..." pfctdayelise 21:57, 2 December 2005 (UTC)
I'm new to this whole Wikipedia contribution thing, so be easy on me. I run a Soul Calibur 3 website, and recently I found out someone had mirrored the videos I host on our website many months back and then posted them up here. However, the person who posted them here recently cleared his webserver so the videos are no longer available. Now I have a powerful webserver of my own and I would like to offer these videos once again to Wikipedia viewers. However, because this is my own website and I dont want people cross-linking to our videos without my express persmission; I require people to register on our website before they can download the video. Registration is COMPLETELY FREE. What would happen, if someone clicks on the link to a video from Wikipedia, and they are already registered on my website, they will be able to download the video. But if they are not registered, they will be asked to register; which only takes about 30 seconds.
Carnildo recently removed some of my Taki match videos from the Taki page because he said "external links should not require logins". I'm not making a complaint, but I didnt see anywhere that said it was against the rules. I spoke to some other people and they recommended I make a post here requesting some sort of decision made on this issue. But as I said before, its my own webserver and I can upload at amazingly fast speeds (try it), and registration is completely free. My website is http://www.crookedjester.com/ and our videos are available in the Gallery section. -- Jaxel 17:43, 26 November 2005 (UTC)
There is an ongoing discussion at NPOV regarding the subject of nested criticisms in an article, or quoting "critics of critics of critics" etc. when an original criticism of the article's subject is added. Please see [4]. Rangerdude 00:55, 4 December 2005 (UTC)
I'm requesting editor input on how to go about better defining the Arbcom's recusal policy when an Arbcom member has a conflict of interest. Right now the policy is overly vague and doesn't define what constitutes a conflict of interest. I posted some possible clarifying provisions here. Please review and comment. Rangerdude 01:16, 4 December 2005 (UTC)
How does one remove or "check" the message in the yellow box stating:
"Please check that the conditions given above are compliant with Wikipedia licensing policy..."
This message occurs on most of my image pages. They are all compliant.
Thanks!
-- Lensim 21:05, 3 December 2005 (UTC)
This page has a guideline
[1] on the article names for regular events like the Olympic Games and the Expo. But is guideline is not used in anyway. The given examples are red links, since there are not even redirects. I created a section on
Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (numbers and dates) to find a solution. --
Mkill 17:53, 3 December 2005 (UTC)
1 Not "guideline": proposal, as mentioned in wikipedia:current surveys#Discussions. See also Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (years in titles)/Poll. -- Francis Schonken 18:04, 3 December 2005 (UTC)
I removed a link to a user page from the “External links” section of Andreas Floer [5], but it was reverted [6]. Is this a valid link? Susvolans ⇔ 11:31, 3 December 2005 (UTC)
Well, is it? (No fair editing it to make it more serious, though.) Lubaf 06:56, 2 December 2005 (UTC)
I'd like to propose a policy with regard to user-space talk pages (specifically User_talk:xxxx). It seems to me that a user should not be able to simply delete content from talk pages unless it is truly vandalism. Case in point, these edits by Pigsonthewing (this user is currently up for RFAr, and has also had an RFC filed against him, both of which he has ignored or is ignoring) : [7] [8] (user removed warnings from his talk page, warnings that lead to him being banned for 48 hours) [9] [10] [11]. I realize this user is probably an extreme case, but these edits of his smack of revisionst history: an attempt to cover-up peoples opinions of him. Sure you can browse the history to try and find every point which the user removed content (content removed with an invalid, IMO, edit summary). But most users tend to archive their talk pages, not remove content they disagree with outright.
My proposal is simple: users should not remove content from their talk page unless it is to a) archive that content on a sub-page or b) remove a very limited definition of vandalism (to be discussed if this topic leads anywhere). Users should absolutely, and under no circumstances, remove warnings given by other editors unless it is to archive them. I do believe there should be a process where an administrator can intervene and remove content that abusive (or wrong, in the case of warnings), but I think it's silly that the kind of edits above are, as far as I know, within the rules/guidelines/policies of Wikipedia.
Opinions/thoughts? — Locke Cole (talk) (e-mail) 00:34, 23 November 2005 (UTC)
Is there a place to discuss Wikipedia accessibility?
A couple of editors suggested that text contrast in wikitable is insufficient. One editor pointed out that many elements in Wikipedia style share the same contrast and that we should not modify just one element.
I would like to discuss Wikipedia accessibility. Where is a good place? Bobblewik 10:02, 6 December 2005 (UTC)
Striver has been creating a great many new articles (as those of you who have listened to me kvetch undoubtedly know <g>). Until recently, he has been linking those articles to existing articles either in the text of the existing article (See XXX for further discussion) or adding links in the "See also" section. Recently, he has adopted another tactic. He inserts a notice at the START of an article saying that "This article is a sub-article of XXX". For examples, see:
Those are just a FEW of the articles he created or modified today using his Striver-defined hierarchical schema. (He's made 98 edits on December 5, by my count, and I'm not sure how many of those are new articles.)
I don't think one user should arrogate to himself the right to set up a hierarchy of articles without any discussion. Links and "see also" don't set up a hierarchy. Sub-article does. Please comment. Zora 09:30, 5 December 2005 (UTC)
Hi everyone. Im the guy Zora haves issues with. Regarding me renaming "Ulema", ill take that upp in the articles talk page.
I would be intrested to hear about some feedback regarding the idea of arraging article in a hierarchical. I asked for some comments here, but didnt get any.
The basic idea is that most articles can be put in a hirarcy. Of course this could lead to some border cases that could be difficult to agree on, but the great benefits i see in being able to see the articles in the context of more detailed sub-articles and less detailed parent articles outwheights the few border case difficulties this can lead to. It also makes it easier to find related topics and having a sense of where in the jungle of articles one is at the curent monent. Also, this takes further advantig of Wikipedia not a paper encyclopedia.
Being a
computer scienctis in the field of
Computer software I took my inspiration from
Object based
programming and
Inheritance (computer science).
I tweak't it a bit and came to a model suitable for Wikipedia. In Object Based Programming, Comunism could inherit from politics and Marxism.
In a Wikimodel of it, i divided articels to:
Sub-articles mention in the beginning of the aritlce what their "direct parent" is, and possibly also what their "parallel parent" or simple "parallel" article is.
Related articles are not mentioned in the beginning of the article, just mentined in the "see also" section.
"None related articles" are simply hypelinked to in the article text.
For example, Democracy and Comunism are both related articles, both being political models. Both are mentioned in the "see also" section of the other article. Alternativly, they could both be put in political models, and link to it as a parent-article.
Both Democracy and Comunism are sub-articles to
politics. Democracy is a "parallel sub-article" to
Majoritarianism, while
Comunism is a "parallel sub-article" to
Marxism.
"Majoritarianism" and "Marxism" are ideologies, while Democracy and Comunism are Form of governments, and "Form of governments" are not sub-sets to "ideologies". "Form of government" is in turn a sub-article to politics. Other sub-articles to "politics" include Economics (household managemen) and posibly Law.
Law enforcement being a "sub-article" to enforcement and a "parallel sub-article" to "Law", since "Law enforcement" is "enforcement" rather than "law". There are laws that are not "enforced" and "enforcement" is not a sub-set of "Law", one could "enforce" a unlawfull act, Chaos enforcement, that being a related article to "Law enforcment", and a "sub-article" to "enforcment"] and a "parallel sub-article" to "Chaos".
Of course there is no such words as "Chaos Enforcement", but the fact that the hirarcy leaded to that word shows how effective it is in categorisation. By tha way, "Chaos Enforcement" gave 23 google hits :P
"Politics" coul in turn be a sub-article to
Distribution and a "parallel sub-article" to
power.
History of democracy is a "sub-article" to history and a "parallel sub-article" to "democracy", since "History" is not a sub-set to "Form of government".
Comunist party is a sub-article to Politcial party and a "parallel sub-article" "Comunism".
I assured that 95% of the articles have one or several natural parent articles.
As a experiment, i created implemented it in Islamic scholars and its parallel article Islamic studies. I actually develped the idea as i worked with the articles, and now i have a finished and presentable proposal. Take a look at those two, and see how deep the sub-articles go, as deep as Islamic Banking and Wilayat al-Faqih, both tracable back to Islamic studies. I was very, very pleased with the solution, and the system made a very good job at showing what articles where missing and i needed to create to expand the hirarcy. For example, i discovered that there was no "Wilayat al-Faqih" while doing Islamic leadership.
i eagerly await feedback! Peace! -- Striver 16:58, 5 December 2005 (UTC)
Thax again for your feedback. Comments? --
Striver 20:32, 5 December 2005 (UTC)
Zora wrote:
Zora, what you are taliking about is "mulitple inheritance", something that was available already in C++. In it, you could have "Pegasus" inherit both "bird" and "Horse", getting both wings and hoves.
It looks like this:
I have no idea of what maid you think that i was proposing a single inheritance model, just look at what i sugested:
That one example inherites 4 (four) diferent parent articles, many of my examples gives multiple parent articles. By "parallel sub-articles" i meant things like a "Jesus" inheriting "pacifism", it cant be done logicly since "pacifism" is a ideology, not a human, less a physical object. That is the only reason i argued to use "parallel sub-articles". Otherwise even the "parallel" part can be droped.
Zora wrote:
Use W:NPOV. Is it NPOV to call him a leader? If yes, make it a sub-article to it. Repeat with "Israeli", "General" and "terrorist". My guess is that "terrorist" does not cutt NPOV.
I didnt plan on doing it to give everyone a nasty surprice, it was the intuitice result of trying to making sense of the mess that existed in the "Islamic scholar", "Islamic studies" and related article, until i figured out how to make it work.
Wahoofive wrote:
The advantage is in greater overview. Due to this, you can see a logical trace, like this:
This line is logical to follow, and gives a great sense of "where" you are in what we have otherwise: a jungle of random articles.
If you are searching for the information that is related to Islamic view of Christianity, and want to know if there is some related article to the Judaism view, you can simply clim the the hirarcy and look around, instead do wandering wheater the article exists, what it can be named and so on...
Try it! Go in to Islamic studies and see how great the feeling of having a good overview is! You can appreciated it without testing it!
Wahoofive wrote:
You are right, i hope to be able to share my experience with you. I doubt the previous method was like the one i propose, flexibility or neutrality is not an issue with this model, it only have advanteges. Yes true, you can come to roughly the same thing with the way we have now, but you will never get the same sense of overview without this proposal.
Bunchofgrapes wrote:
Brother, those things are not exclusive of eachoter. You can have both a great articel in a great categorised structure. About stubs, Wikipedia does have them for a reason. If there are lots of stubs created, that means that there are a need to fill them with information, Stubs are good, not bad :)
Deco wrote
And that is exactly what im talikng about! Linking up sub-articles to the parents!
Categories are great, and this is a in-between that makes it easier to get a quik overview.
You dont need to Link the "Islam" article to all its sub-articles, only to
Everything will be included in somewhere in in those three things, famous Muslims will go, for example
or
Of course, "Caliphs" not only a sub-article to "Muslim leaders" but also to, for example, "Famous leaders".
I mean look at this Islam#See_also, its a mess, it have no order what so ever. The See also of Islam now contains:
That is totaly random! It is much better to replace that with:
==Sub-articles==
And if anyone want to see about Christianity, the can just go to the parent article of Islam, "Relgion" and from there go to where they want. Isnt that much cleaere than the chaos that we have in many articles? Look at Christianity#See_also:
History and denominations:
Total anarchy! that could be replace with:
== Sub-articles ==
The choise is obvious IMHO :)
I mean, think if you are looking for "Christian views of men" and dont find it in the "see also", what to do? Make a search? In the proposed system, you just go to "Christian studies" and follow the subarticles, for example
Cant find it? Then you'll know that its not there, instead of it having some name you couldent gues or seach for :)
Deco wrote
And that is what i propose, multiple classification, and also being explicit and ordered about it :)
Rembeber, things have multible classification, so you can follow "Islamic banking" in any of this ways:
Hoping for more feedback!
-- Striver 04:28, 6 December 2005 (UTC)
Because Wikipedia's applied sourcing methodologies are not at academic levels across its content I will no longer be participating in this project. I have also pondered the thought that Wikipedia's internal group dynamics more resemble those of a charismatic religious (or political activist) organisation rather than a scholarly team writing an encyclopedia. Wyss 15:51, 19 November 2005 (UTC)
Wikipedia is a Meta Culture Blog Retrieved from " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Wyss"
Wikipedia is not a scholarly project and it will never be. If you want to read scholarly texts, read scientific magazines, or a scientific wiki. I fully appreciate the efforts of the academics here, and I am too trying to reduce the crap level, but unless we get all schools in every country to teach proper scholarly techniques, an encyclopedia that everyone can edit will always be like that. As for using Wikipedia for scholarly work: Don't. Note on troll percentage: Wikipedia is a Scale-free network, thus the percentage of academics and the percentage of no-brain-trolls will remain more or less constant no matter how much Wikipedia grows. Mkill 17:37, 3 December 2005 (UTC)
I have decided that I want to edit Wikipedia in the classic skin. This skin does not put a line under 2nd level headers, as the default skin does. However, I like the lines, so from now on everyone should insert an extra line above the 2nd level header so the articles look good for me.
---- ==Heading==
Thanks, Gerard Foley 01:52, 27 November 2005 (UTC)
I also edit in the classic skin, in no small part because I loathe those lines. If you really want them, though, put the following in User:Gmcfoley/standard.css:
h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6 { padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom: 1px solid #CCCCCC; } #article h1, #article h2, #article h3, #article h4, #article h5, #article h6 { margin-bottom: 0.3em; }
— Cryptic (talk) 23:38, 28 November 2005 (UTC)
Hi, thanks for the advice. I was not actually serious about this, it’s to do with a dispute over on Wiktionary, where this is common practice. I want these extra lines removed, however Hippietrail said we should wait for comments from Eclecticology because he edits in the classic skin. I just wanted to see how people would react to a request to add them here just because someone wants to edit in the classic skin. You can see the discussion at wikt:Wiktionary:Beer parlour#Four dashes. Gerard Foley 20:26, 30 November 2005 (UTC)
i have more than 3000 edits, see "user contributions" - i was blocked for no reason. User:Haham hanuka