This page contains discussions that have been archived from Village pump (proposals). Please do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to revive any of these discussions, either start a new thread or use the talk page associated with that topic.
< Older discussions · Archives: A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z, AA, AB, AC, AD, AE, AF, AG, AH, AI, AJ, AK, AL, AM, AN, AO, AP, AQ, AR · 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193, 194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211
Disclaimer: This is just an idea that's been floating in my mind. I do not have a full-scale proposal nor have I thought about major flaws very much.
I have been wondering, if it wasn't better to code the deletion-process into the software somehow. Currently when you notice a page that either meets WP:CSD or WP:PROD or warrants a AfD for other reasons, you use {{ db}}, {{ prod}} or {{ afd}} to notify people of it. Problem is, as I have noticed, that those editor's, whose articles are tagged as such, may remove those templates and sometimes this allows them to stall or even avoid deletion because when a speedy-tag is removed, it needs to be re-added for an admin to notice about the speedy-worthiness of this article. So I wondered, if that could be changed. The de-wiki uses a process to mark revisions as stable. While I do not think that process will be much use here, a similar idea could solve the deletion problem:
Instead of marking versions as stable, we could use such marking to mark pages as deletable. Like this: An established user (autoconfirmed) can tick the box "mark this article for deletion" and is then able to select the process, i.e. Speedy (with criteria), Prod (with reason) or AfD. The marking can only be removed by this user or an admin. Admins could also set articles to never be marked as deletable (like a deletable=sysop flag). That way no especially created accounts could try and stall deletion of their pages and we could avoid edit wars about such tags because an admin will decide if the tag is to stay in place and that's it.
Okay, that's roughly my idea. I now accept all insults as to why this is a bad idea and all flaws pointed out to me. Please be gentle ;-) So Why 08:01, 4 September 2008 (UTC)
As implemented, speedy tags can be reviewed by anyone with the appropriate rights (not necessarily the right to delete pages), but can be objected to and endorsed by regular users, which advise the decision of whoever reviews speedy deletion. For prod, any objection automatically turns it into a deletion discussion. The nifty part is that we can separate the review rights for speedies, AfDs and prods, so we can let anybody half-trusted with decent judgement delete expired prods, and we can restrict closure of discussions to more experienced users. It's up for testing at my test wiki, if anybody's interested. — Werdna • talk 13:26, 4 September 2008 (UTC)
Well, how would you have the system I've developed modified? I'm very open to ideas. — Werdna • talk 08:14, 6 September 2008 (UTC)
I think the watchlist would be a lot more useful if it had options: 1. to show only edits since the user's last edit to an article 2. to show only edits since the last time the user viewed the article That would save a lot of time for people who have several articles on their watchlist. Bubba73 (talk), 02:03, 7 September 2008 (UTC)
Many Wikipedia pages on educational institutions routinely include a Notable Alumni section. This section is in general a list of the names of persons who were supposedly alumni of the institution about which the article deals with. Brief indications of the achievements of the individuals are also sometimes provided. Such scanty information does not help one to place the individuals in the spacio-temporal evolution of the institution. Moreover, immediate nonavailability of further facts makes verifiability difficult. To make the Notable Alumni section an authentic historical document I suggest that the following particulars about the claimed alumni should necessarily be provided in the section (the data may be given in the form of a table with appropriate headings):
It is also suggested that when judging the quality of a Wikipedia article on an educational institution due weightage be given for preparing the Notable Alumni section conforming to the above guidelines. Krishnachandranvn ( talk) 01:44, 9 September 2008 (UTC)
Wikipedia should have an intelligent App Button.
Basically how it works is it allows people to display wikipedia articles on their website. But instead of just displaying a url, it will display the first few sentences of the article, along with the main photo on the wikipedia article and a 'click here to read more' link.
This feature would be useful for musicians,actors etc, who have websites and they would be able to put this intelligent App Button on there.
So every wikipedia article should have a button saying "add this to your website" and when users click on it some html code will be displayed. Users then copy and paste this code into their website.
The intelligent App Button should be the size of about 410x530 pixels. The first few sentences could be displayed at the top, followed by the main photo, then a wikipedia logo, then the 'click here to read more', then a wikipedia logo. The main photo would have to be scaled down so it doesn't take up too much space and the text size may have to be a smaller font size too.
The intelligent App Button should automatically update the first few sentences of an article and main photo if it changes.
Wikipedia should work with record companies so people can see what the intelligent App Button would look like on a musician's website. Danielspencer2 ( talk) 04:28, 9 September 2008 (UTC)
Alot of musician's websites already list their wikipedia url's anyway. Soulja boy's official website lists his wikipedia article url there. As for this being open to abuse, well it could be solved by instead of automatically updating the button when an article changes, the button could be automatically updated every 15 minutes which is more than enough time for someone to repair an article and ban the user who used the article for promotion. As for this not being easy to develop, myspace and youtube already offer a simple copy and paste html code feature for their videos to be embedded on external websites. Danielspencer2 ( talk) 02:40, 10 September 2008 (UTC)
Doesn't copyright law say that as long as the copyright infringed thing is removed when a host is notified it's fine? So if a copyright infringement has occured i am sure the wikipedia editors will correct it within 24 hours. Danielspencer2 ( talk) 07:39, 10 September 2008 (UTC)
Agreed that this would promote abuse, and really if one wants to scrape WP for content an even mildly intelligent web developer should be able to. If one is interested in this though, an account on the toolserver should be able to produce an rss backend for article "exerpts" I would think. then pull the data server side w/ something like magpie rss or similar, or if you want it REALLY live, a simple Flash (yuk) or JS could pull the data. And why call it an "intelligent app button" ??? ./zro (⠠⠵) 09:49, 10 September 2008 (UTC)
We have an option that can prompt us for an edit summary in preferences. Is it possible to make something like this to prompt for the signature in talk pages? I guess it is hard (maybe impossible) since it should be checked from the edit box itself and not from a different box as for the edit summary and more work should be done to check for this, but it would be really helpful if there was something like that. Sorry if this has been discussed before, but I didn't find anything like this. Chamal Talk ± 13:04, 9 September 2008 (UTC)
~~~~
as long as it isn't <nowiki>~~~~</nowiki>. Then there would need to be the "don't sign" check box. It seems like it should be simple to implement. --
Imperator3733 (
talk) 15:58, 9 September 2008 (UTC)Congratulations to the devs on adding the "active users" count to special:statistics. The very large ratio of user accounts to admins is often used to argue that (i) adminship is a Very Big Deal and (ii) we are hopelessly under-manned on the admin front, but the ratio of active users to admins (about 7:1) gives exactly the opposite impression. To make the comparison really fair we need to list "active" admins as well as "active" users, so here are my two proposals:
The last point is crucial as with different definitions you can get estimates varying by many orders of magnitude: active = has edited at least once gives about 3 million users; active = has edited within the last minute gives about 200 users. (FWIW, the current estimate about 11,000 active users seems reasonably in line with, for instance, the WMF board election eligibility requirements). PaddyLeahy ( talk) 14:55, 11 September 2008 (UTC)
I do a lot of cleaning up links to disambiguation pages, and Wikipedia Cleaner has a nifty feature called "Local Watch List". For those not familiar with it, it allows you to maintain a list of pages and store a numerical record of how many other pages are linking to each of them, differentiating between articles, templates, and all pages in total (User, Talk, User Talk, Image, Portal, etc.). Then, when you next update that list, it'll indicate where the number of incoming links has increased or decreased from the figure you stored before. If it's decreased, that's great; if it's increased, then you know there's work to be done.
For dab clean-up, this is a great tool, because you can then go in and address new incoming links immediately. However, it's limited in that it doesn't indicate which links are the new ones — if there are a few pages with links that you haven't been able to fix before, new pages will blend in among them. It also requires launching Wikipedia Cleaner (which isn't working well at the moment) and running the update, when some disambiguations are simple enough that I wouldn't want to bother using this external tool.
What I'm wondering is whether it would be possible to create a different spin on this feature within Wikipedia itself? It would be more like the existing Watchlist, but instead of showing you edits to the pages you're watching, it would show you new incoming links to the pages you're watching. Beyond disambiguation pages, I could also see this as being useful for users working within various projects — a new incoming link to a page that you follow within your project might indicate another article that could also fall under the project.
Mlaffs ( talk) 20:08, 12 September 2008 (UTC)
Does this exist? (If so, sorry for posting). If not, I think it would be nice to know when a lot of new pages are falling under CSD and such. Lәo( βǃʘʘɱ) 17:28, 13 September 2008 (UTC)
The Body of Knowledge of Medical Science has become so large that no one physician can be familiar with all the diseases, symptoms and treatments. Even dividing up the information into specialties and specialists there are often cases that slip through the cracks when problem is obscure enough that the supervising physician is not familiar with it, or the diagnosis is missed through human error.
In addition, the general public's access to affordable medical care, both in the USA and other advanced countries, as well as developing and poorer countries are major longstanding social problems.
I propose a Medical-Wikipedia project to organize and distribute the known body of medical science regarding medical disease, symptoms and treatments in a form available to all. This could be used by medical professionals to organize the diagnosis process; for research and instruction, and a certain level of supervision.
Tis could eventually be used as a substitute for professional medical care where it is unavailable and/or unaffordable. It would help break the stranglehold on medical care that keeps many people from accessing medical care even in countries with advanced medical care industries. It would help ordinary people keep abreast of the medical professionals in learning enough to be able to manage their own care, instead of just agreeing with what the doctor ordered.
Doctors are not perfect, they are human just like everyone else. They need the help, the patients and their loved ones need the help, and this has been technologically feasible for at least a decade. I actually had heard of a pilot system like this around 15 years ago to help train interns; but it was never fully developed, and seems to have disappeared.
This is a project that could have major benefits for the entire human race. Obviously the information would need to be absolutely accurate, so input would need to be carefully managed, not quite the 'anyone can contribute' aspect of Wikipedia. But the organization and distribution of the information, and the benefit to all are very much in the Wikipedia sphere of influence, and I think the Wikipedia Foundation should take up this project.
Jim Baranski, Superior Technologies, Shalom Orchard Winery & B&B, Franklin ME
Would it be possible to modify the page history so that it will color the block of entries from the top downward that resulted in no net change to the page content? That is, if the edits consisted of a series of changes that were each reverted, I would like to be able to see that at a glance (via the background color) rather than having to perform a compare. (I don't always trust the history message to let me know the revert was done properly.) Instead, I would like to just look at the last retained change(s) on downward. In fact, shading any edit/revert sets that result in no net change would be helpful. Thanks.— RJH ( talk) 19:43, 10 September 2008 (UTC)
There are currently several discussions underway to rename various category hierarchies for various kinds of settlements or communities. There are three umbrella nominations for renaming at Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2008 September 14 and there is also Wikipedia:Categories_for_discussion/Log/2008_September_13#Categories for 'place' in the UK are slowly getting into a mess. There really needs to be a community-wide debate on this issue, and I hope that some with a bit experience in such largescale consensus processes can get involved to help organize this debate and, if possible, guide it through to an encompassing consensus-based decision. __ meco ( talk) 12:30, 17 September 2008 (UTC)
Do you know what pisses me off? When somebody moves a page to "Hagger!?!?!?!" and that nonsense gets added to my watchlist. I have to remove pages like that from my watchlist all the time.
I have a solution for this, make an option in "my preferences" that says "Add pages to your watchlist that somebody moves" and uncheck that box. Not only is this annoying me when somebody is vandalism-moving pages, also I want to MANUALLY add pages to my watchlist. I don't want it to be done automaticlly, because like I said, Hagger is bad, and is the main reason why I want to manually add moved pages to my watch list. TheBlazikenMaster ( talk) 14:20, 16 September 2008 (UTC)
on your watchlist. I imagine it is possible to do so, when you move a page, you get the option to watch it, why not just make that option more universal-- Jac16888 ( talk) 14:43, 16 September 2008 (UTC)
There is a discussion going on here about whether to change the name of the notability guideline. — Elipongo ( Talk contribs) 10:28, 18 September 2008 (UTC)
I have recently been browsing a lot of mathematical and scientific articles, and have noticed a problem with them. A great number of them make no sense whatsoever to the lay person. In what seems to be something of a Catch-22, the only people who might be able to understand some of these articles would be people who know all about the subject matter anyway and so wouldn't need to read them. As for the curious public who just want to learn a bit more about maths or physics, say, these articles will probably make no sense at all. For instance, of those of you reading my comment, how many can understand what the formulae in Lorentz transformation or Special relativity mean just by reading the articles?
You might argue that some knowledge of the subject matter is expected of those reading such articles, just like people who want to read Wikipedia articles in general need to know the alphabet, but I would say that some of these formulae are too complex not to warrant some sort of explanation.
I propose, then, that one of two things happen:
{{formula|[[Derivative|Differentiation]]|[[Matrix (mathematics)|Matrices]]}}
...would produce something along the lines of the box that is below in the article.
This article contains
formulae concerning: You might find it useful to read the articles on those types of formulae in order to fully understand this article. |
WP:MTAA seems to favour the first option wherever possible, but where it suggests that simplification is impossible and the article be left alone, could my second idea be used?
It Is Me Here ( talk) 16:47, 22 July 2008 (UTC)
For more information about this
formula, see: |
I support the idea of a derivitive of the {{ Too specialized}} template for maths and science articles. Obviously these articles have to be encyclopedic, but it's almost too encyclopedic, to the point where it barely makes sense if you know what I mean. Look at this quote from Special relativity:
"Special relativity reveals that c is not just the velocity of a certain phenomenon, namely the propagation of electromagnetic radiation (light)—but rather a fundamental feature of the way space and time are unified as spacetime. A consequence of this is that it is impossible for any particle that has mass to be accelerated to the speed of light."
This is one of those paragraphs that just makes you go "What?!" and makes you need to read it several times to actually form an understanding of it in your mind. I assume a lot of these articles are written by "experts", to the point where only said experts can actually understand them. I'm not saying to dumb things down. Don't dumb things down, as advanced things have to be explained in advanced ways, just clarify them and make things clearer. Sometimes it's just all in the language, and there is such a thing as a "language rich sentence". I support such a proposal mainly because I personally find these articles difficult to read, simply because it's just a little too much. Wikipedia needs to be accessible to everyone, including these articles. Obviously most readers should know basic maths in the same way they are expected to know basic English, but to expect them to learn all about advanced maths before reading about these articles is ridiculous and defeats the purpose of an encyclopedia. I'm not saying that articles need to teach things, just make things easier to understand. -- .: Alex :. 18:07, 22 July 2008 (UTC)
Some articles already link to indices and glossaries, such as Table of mathematical symbols and Glossary of group theory. Perhaps you could ask the various wikiprojects to create templates to make such linking easier. It is somewhat unlikely that all of the science and mathematics projects will want to use exactly the same text. JackSchmidt ( talk) 18:26, 22 July 2008 (UTC)
{{suggested wikibooks|book=Calculus|page=Differentiation}}
{{formula links|Derivative|Limit (mathematics)|Matrix (mathematics)}}
(outdent because my : key was getting tired) Same way you make anything "official" around here; ask if anyone has any concerns (this thread should provide that), then start using them once that's settled, then see if anyone brings up any other concerns (an ongoing process). Here's a concern to start you off; can you improve the wording on these any? If the template syntax is too arcane please go ahead and simplify it or ask me to explain. :-) -- tiny plastic Grey Knight ⊖ 14:35, 23 July 2008 (UTC)
I don't support the idea that we would add a special template just to say that a formula in an article includes a derivative. That's the sort of thing that can be handled in prose. We already link to wikibooks and wikiversity, when appropriate, in the "see also" sections of articles, so no additional templates are needed for them. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 20:38, 23 July 2008 (UTC)
(Outdent)As a compromise, how about adding categories (preferably hidden) like "Physics concepts dependent on an understanding of Matrices"? That gets the point across that you need to understand basic elements of algebra and precalculus without cluttering up the mainspace with unnecessary "gb2algebra" templates every time there's an equals sign in an article. Celarnor Talk to me 18:50, 24 July 2008 (UTC)
I myself have noticed this problem too. I am hoping to study Physics at University from October, so I would consider my "expertise" (if you can call it that!) to be in physics and maths topics, yet these are usually incredibly difficult to follow on Wikipedia, compared to other topics I like to read like Philosophy, Politics and History, on which I don't have a great deal of knowledge but can still follow. Deamon138 ( talk) 17:30, 4 August 2008 (UTC)
Large chunks of math articles in wikipedia *are* highly specialized. They cannot help but be -- it is not only the language and the notation, but the very concepts themselves that require mathematical maturity and repeated practice with the definitions and styles of a particular subfield, to understand. We cannot do otherwise - these concepts took hundreds of years to develop into their present form, and sadly their fundaments are often not in the culture, the way the fundamentals of things like laws and social norms are. It would be like trying to make an article on accounting understandable to somebody who can't add, or trying to make an article on civil procedure understandable to somebody from a tribal, pre-law society. To expect to understand a concept like special relativity on a quick, non-intensive readthrough for the first time is unreasonable. We do make efforts to make the articles accessible to technically literate laypeople (say, engineers with a mathematical bent), and goodness knows mathematicians are too frequently guilty of being more complicated than they need to be, but if you're going to create tags that essentially say "serious and arduous intellectual effort required to understand the full meaning of this article if you've never seen anything like it before," you might as well tag every non-biographical article in the math section, for all the good it will do. RayAYang ( talk) 06:30, 5 August 2008 (UTC)
posted by Arydberg Much of the above would go away if there was a link on the title page to the "simple english wikipedia" and a explanation that it was for beginners. Arydberg ( talk) 14:08, 28 August 2008 (UTC)
We've had this discussion at the math WikiProject already. Before anyone starts editing based on the discussion above, please read Wikipedia talk:WikiProject_Mathematics/Archive 38#article difficulty level. Ozob ( talk) 18:28, 5 August 2008 (UTC)
This a very old debate. So I'm going to go with Euclid on this one. I think adding templates and other flying widget spam to pages doesn't help anything. We try very hard to make our articles accessible. If, like King Ptolemy, you refuse to make the effort, I suggest you just tune the TV to the animal channel. Loisel ( talk) 19:19, 5 August 2008 (UTC)
Unsurprisingly, mathematics has become more difficult since Euclid... Also, The Elements is a masterpiece of mathematical writing that was unsurpassed for about two thousand years. Loisel ( talk) 22:13, 5 August 2008 (UTC)
The initial poster wrote:
Can someone PLEASE cite some examples of this? I have seen and edited FAR more math articles on Wikipedia than all but very few people. I've seen this particular complain stated repeatedly. I don't know any examples. I don't know of any ATTEMPTS to cite any. The initial poster above mentions only Lorentz transformation and special relativity. Those don't appear to be attempts to cite examples of the "catch-22" complained of. Is there some other that is? Michael Hardy ( talk) 15:51, 7 August 2008 (UTC)
Given a sample consisting of independent observations X1,..., Xn of a random vector X ∈ Rp×1 (a p×1 column), an unbiased estimator of the covariance matrix
is the sample covariance matrix
where
is the sample mean.
That is not something the layperson would grasp in that form. Personally I've seen some of the symbols before in statistics, but I can't follow that. Bear in mind that is just one example I found with a quick look, there are hundreds more. No offence, but since you are a huge editor of maths articles you are likely to say "I don't know any examples" since I'm guessing you understand the maths already? Deamon138 ( talk) 16:07, 7 August 2008 (UTC)
It was complained initially that articles were written in such a way that only those who already knew the material could understand them.
I don't believe that.
Then it was complained that articles are written in such a way that lay readers could not understand them.
That is true. But it's not a problem.
Then it was complained that articles are written in such a way that lay readers couldn't tell what you had to know to read them and what the general subject matter area was.
That is too often true, and I am the foremost complainer about that problem on Wikipedia. I have probably also done more to remedy that problem than anyone else. Fortunately, however, it is a problem that does not afflict most articles. I'm talking about articles whose opening sentence is something like "Consider a sequence {Tn} of bounded linear operators on a separable Banach space B." The lay reader can't tell whether that's about theology or chemistry or psychoanalysis or international trade negotiations. I am foremost among those who have been objecting to that way of starting articles.
Someone blamed me for the abrupt opening sentence in estimation of covariance matrices, which said:
Michael Hardy ( talk) 13:43, 11 August 2008 (UTC)
Indeed. Writing them to be accessible to as wide an audience as possible often leaves them in a state where lay readers cannot understand them. Not always, and indeed sometimes articles can be improved in this regard, but still there are lots of cases where an article written to be accesssible to as wide an audience as possible is one that lay readers won't understand. Michael Hardy ( talk) 17:17, 11 August 2008 (UTC)
Here is an assortment of points which may be helpful. Their juxtaposition with each other is not intended to indicate any particular interconnection beyond their common relationship to the problem under discussion.
At this stage of the discussion, I do not have a preference from among the various options, which include the following.
Any one or combination of those options is acceptable to me. Also, the following may be helpful.
Earlier on this page, you gave an example of an annotated equation with links to other articles in Wikipedia. I have copied and edited it to appear as shown below, although the spacing still needs improvement. I have removed the first
monomial of
Euler's identity from the annotation. It is used in
mathematics stubs. I removed it for two reasons: (1) in order to simplify the editing, and (2) because it seemed both inappropriate and unnecessary that an equation annotation have a stub symbol (either for a general mathematics stub or for any of the more specific mathematics stubs listed at
Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Stub types).
|
For more information on how I did this, you can see HTML element and b:HTML Programming/Tables.
Here are some more links (a few of them internal, most of them external), some of them listed under headings composed of Google search terms. I am listing them here because I believe they have a possibility (even if small) of helping Wikipedia editors to make mathematics articles more accessible to readers. (Even if they do not help in that way, then their presence here could still be of interest in other ways to mathematics editors reading this section.)
"explaining difficult mathematics"
"gender differences mathematics"
Here are some more links which may help Wikipedia editors to make mathematics articles more accessible.
I have sent a message to a famous educational communicator, requesting advice from that person to be given here to help us in reaching a consensus.
The following 17 pages are selected from the top 300 search results from my Google Advanced Search for all the words "wikipedia mathematics articles village pump" within the site "en.wikipedia.org", or, in a few cases, are pages linked from those results. I have left them in the order of the search results, because the first results seem to be the most relevant and most useful to this discussion.
From my Wikipedia search for "mathematics articles" by using the Search button, I selected 48 pages. In the left column, they are listed in the order in which I found them. In the right column, they are loosely sorted for convenience.
Although I found many articles about individual mathematicians among the search results, I singled out
Paul Erdős because of his prolific collaboration with other mathematicians in writing articles about mathematics. If his collaboration was in many diverse fields of mathematics, then his work might provide some clues to making Wikipedia mathematics articles more accessible, not only to non-mathematicians, but also to mathematicians specializing in fields outside those of the articles.
A related challenge in explaining mathematics was met in
one-room schools. In a one-room school, a teacher taught academic basics to five to eight grade levels of elementary-age boys and girls. Maybe an understanding of the skills used by the teacher in shifting attention from one level to another, while maintaining appropriate instructions for each intended audience, can assist writers and editors of mathematics articles for Wikipedia.
Because my search found the
list of paradoxes, it seems fitting to include these other articles, which are closely related to that one and to this discussion.
Here are some more mathematics websites, which might help Wikipedia editors to make mathematics articles more accessible to a general readership.
(Incidentally, these together with others in the previous subsection of this section are probably sufficient
for a
list of mathematics websites or a
list of mathematical websites.)
From column 4 ("Proposals") of Wikipedia:Village pump archive#October 2004 - October 2007, I visited each page linked, searched for the character string "math", and selected the following 29 sections as having some relevance to the challenge of making mathematics articles more accessible to a general readership. The dates are from the discussions themselves, and do not necessarily agree with the corresponding wikified dates on the index page.
Proposal; Adding Wikiatlas to Wikipedia's array of reference materials. Lack of an atlas is a glaring omission. Any basic personal library's reference section starts with an encyclopedia, a dictionary and an atlas. Slightly better ones add a thesaurus and a book of quotations and possibly a general world history, then other reference books tailored to the individuals interests. Wiki has moved on to the thesaurus and quotes before covering the basics. Wikibooks is even beginning to fill in the the individual interests niche. Done properly this is a big project, hence a daunting one. As atlas's are graphic by nature few of wikipedia's current resources can be applied to the project, although wikipedia does have some good maps available to it. Wikipedia itself was, and is, a daunting project, yet was deemed worthwhile enough to do. Another argument against taking up this project is that the resource is available elsewhere on the internet. This is simply not true. Google maps, mapquest and the like are great for finding an address or getting directions, the CIA site has very nice current political maps, and looking at satellite photos of your neighborhood or where the latest typhoon has struck is way cool. However these are only the smallest part of what a good electronic atlas could be. Try finding a elevation map of Europe and the Mediteranian basin without cities or political boundaries. Aside from being a good thing in and of itself wikiatlas would be a terrific support tool for wikipedia. For example there is a very nice map in wikipedia of ancient Greek and Pheonician colonies. The creator must have gone to a great deal of trouble to create it so he could include it in his article. If he could summon up a map of the area involved that was copyright free his task would have been much easier. The difficulty in finding appropriate maps has certainly caused some editors to skip adding a map altogether, or reduce the quantity of maps included in a given article. I am surprised I could not find a reference to the addition of an atlas in the wiki pages. I would be even more surprised if I was the first to suggest it. If there is a discussion of the idea somewhere in wikiworld a pointer to the area would be appreciated. For those interested in the idea this is how I think it should work, ideally. Opening page is a globe, that can be manipulated with the pointer to show any face. A button would allow the view to be toggled back and forth between a flat projection or globe view. A slider would allow zooming in or out. Another slider would be used to go back and forth in time. A series of buttons would turn on or off a number of filters for borders, roads, rails, cities, elevation, climate, population, language, satellite image etc. The borders of the map could be adjusted to show exactly the area of interest. A couple of buttons would allow printing or saving to an image file, at screen size or any scale multiplier the user selects. An area and time period could have specialty maps attached, and if browsing the right area a specialty map available button would appear. when pushed the specialty map pop up. For example; if browsing Asia in the 1250-1270 period a a button would appear that lead to a map of Marco Polo's travels. One more button would lead to the index page. A place could be searched for through all history or the search could be narrowed to a certain era, continent, or nation. An option to show the resulting place or it's location would be available. For example a search for Toronto would show a map of Toronto, or a map of southern Ontario and north eastern USA centered on Toronto. Links to articles in Wikipedia could be added, so clicking on a nation's name would link to the article about the nation. And naturally Wikipedia articles could link to Wikipedia.
-- JoSo ( talk) 07:19, 15 September 2008 (UTC)
I think I've seen this idea suggested a half-dozen or so times over the years, but nothing has ever come of it to my knowledge. I know there is a project request someplace venue on meta:, perhaps you could find other supporters of the idea there? As for why there is no Wikiatlas, if I had to guess I would assume it's due to software issues. Programmer hours are the rarest of all volunteer resources, I recall reading that we write a dozen FAs for every fulfilled bug request (and most bug requests are quite minor). -- erachima talk 10:09, 15 September 2008 (UTC)
(in re: to the "more FAs than bugs" comment): Did enwiki churn out 1056 FAs last week? Because 88 bugs were marked as FIXED. :) ^ demon [omg plz] 20:14, 18 September 2008 (UTC)
I'd like to have this extension enabled on our wiki. It has proven to be an effective tool for cleaning up vandalism and quickly reversing disruption on other Wikimedia wikis such as Meta and Commons. Basically, the extension allows an administrator to delete in bulk, the pages created by a vandal. - Rjd0060 ( talk) 21:38, 17 September 2008 (UTC)
I'd like to suggest that some mention of WP:YFA (hopefully avoiding being too patronizing, in case it hits experienced editors making a stupid mistake) should be added to most (not all) of the CSD warning templates. Any thoughts on which or inclinations against doing so? Seems like it might be more productive than just slapping users down without making any productive suggestions. MrZaius talk 12:03, 21 September 2008 (UTC)
Currently, users are able to remove warnings that they receive from their talk pages. However, if they continue to do this, they could conceivably vandalize forever and nobody would know unless they were continually caught by the same user or the person reverting the vandalism checked the edit history of every user (which would be time consuming). I'd like to propose that users not be able to remove warnings from their talk page. It just makes it easier to keep track of how much vandalism a person has done without having to go through a contribution history.
(Note: I was told that they are allowed to do this by another user. If they aren't, then ignore this.) KJS77 Join the Revolution 00:08, 22 September 2008 (UTC)
After seeing ban discussions like Koh's, Kurt's Scetpre's, Steve Crossin's, and Prom3th3n's, I've written up User:MBisanz/RfBan as a proposed way to better handle such discussions in the future. Please comment at the talk page. MBisanz talk 00:20, 22 September 2008 (UTC)
Recently, I posted a message at Wikipedia:Reference desk/Language and, because of the length of the section heading, I did not have any space to provide an edit summary--there was not even enough space for one character. Should there be a length limit for section headings? What is the best formula for deciding what that length limit should be?
Here is a temporary link:
Wikipedia:Reference desk/Language#I am looking for a term that is used to describe the time wasting practice of pronouncing an acronym that takes longer to pronounce than if one simply pronounced the words that were initialized? {
sic}.
Here is a perpetual link:
Wikipedia:Reference desk/Language (September 17) "I am looking for a term that is used to describe the time wasting practice of pronouncing an acronym that takes longer to pronounce than if one simply pronounced the words that were initialized?" {
sic}.
I would like to remind people that the proposal to move Main Page is still ongoing. It is currently proposed that Main Page be moved to a new namespace. For more information, please see WP:VPR/PP#New namespace?. It would be good if more people are involved in this decision. -- Imperator3733 ( talk) 14:29, 23 September 2008 (UTC)
It would be very informative (and benificial for musicians) if under the song details infobox the ability to list the key signature of a song was added for singles or individual song pages.
As it currently stands, articles on individual issues of a comic book series are not allowed on wikipedia. I propose that this be changed. My principal reason is this: the current policies do not allow for adequate coverage of comics-related material.
There's only so much plot detail you can cover in a character or series page without that page veering off topic and becoming filled with extraneous detail. Additionally, if one wants to find information about a certain event in a comic book, they will have to spend time poring over multiple pages covering the series and characters in question; maybe they'll find what they're looking for, maybe they won't. A neat and tidy solution is to simply allow these pages. I think they would prove to be a valuable addition to this encyclopedia. In some cases, graphic novel pages fill this need, but this is an inadequate compromise because many fine comics have never been collected into a graphic novel and, in addition, graphic novel pages are routinely deleted on grounds of notability.
Further support: television episodes are widely featured throughout wikipedia, and in many cases have become featured articles. This is comparable to the issue of individual comic book issues. Yes, there are low-quality TV episode articles, but there are many more high-quality ones. I think most people would agree that these articles add to wikipedia quite a bit, and I think that, given the chance, comic book issue pages will do the same. Cerebellum ( talk) 23:31, 23 September 2008 (UTC)
I use to contribute to a smaller wiki and think spreading new policies or agreed upon guidelines would be quite easy if administrators could simply type them (or a link to them) into an editor and then send them to registered users, who would see the news message appear on top of the wiki page they are watching in the same way they are notified of a new message on their talk pages. Just adding new policies or guidelines to the help section or wherever they belong might make them go unnoticed. I'm not sure if this made sense for the main wiki though.-- Emaster82 ( talk) 01:31, 24 September 2008 (UTC)
A week or two ago I proposed that the definition of "active user" on special:statistics was made clear, and some kind user did so: viz the template was edited to state that active means "has edited in the last 30 days". Just about as soon as that thread was archived from here, special:statistics was radically re-designed and the information was lost again. Can someone put it back? E.g. by defining the term in Wikipedia:statistics and linking to it from the special:statistics template (I have no idea where the latter is located or I'd do it myself). PaddyLeahy ( talk) 15:02, 24 September 2008 (UTC)
I'd like to propose adding the following namespaces to MediaWiki:Robots.txt to prevent their indexing by search engines
There is no encyclopedic content on any of these pages and all but a tiny fraction are unwatched. Frequently drive-by vandals leave attack pages in these namespaces, knowing that it is unlikely anyone will see them. Since they are not used much for legitimate purposes (other than a few template and mediawiki talk pages), there will not be much collateral damage from adding them to the robots.txt file. MBisanz talk 01:50, 15 September 2008 (UTC)
As a technical note, though, Ilmari is correct. This would be implemented in the configuration files, not on a local page. -- MZMcBride ( talk) 21:46, 17 September 2008 (UTC)
There is a proposal to amend the bot policy regarding whether or not administrators need approval to run bots under their account. All are invited to comment. Prodego talk 14:51, 21 September 2008 (UTC)
why dosnt wiki cover the lesser religions like i'm the Alimbic religion theres only a little on it and i added that bit.-- Mindoshawn ( talk) 18:20, 24 September 2008 (UTC)
Originally proposed and discussed here ( WT:AFD).
If an article is listed on AFD for 5 days and...
Then it may, at the closing admin's discretion, be treated like an expired prod. The admin deletes it with no prejudice against recreation and the article is undeleted upon request, noting this in his closing statement and in the deletion log. I think this would be a better alternative to constantly relisting nominations over and over again until there are enough !votes to make a call. Note that this should only be one option available to the closing admin. He could still relist or close "no consensus" etc. if he feels that's best.
Of those who objected, the main concern was the short window available to someone who would wish the article be kept to participate in the deletion discussion. Other business might keep him away from Wikipedia while " his" article is silently deleted. I am assuming the same objection was raised when the proposed deletion system was first being discussed. The answer was to make such deletions very easy to undo. Such an article would be restored upon request or could be recreated without being subject to CSD G4. I'm proposing the same thing here. -- Ron Ritzman ( talk) 02:19, 16 September 2008 (UTC)
Isn't it possible that this AfD was already prodded, and was taken to AfD because someone objected? It doesn't strike me as impossible that someone contested a prod, and then didn't follow up on the AfD discussion. Personally, I think if something doesn't meet speedy deletion criteria and there isn't a discussion leading to a delete decision, then it should default to keep and not delete. Avruch T 00:53, 17 September 2008 (UTC)
I think it might be nice if there was a count of the number of views for a given page so as to see the popularity of one topic over another.
Just a suggestion... —Preceding unsigned comment added by Crsteinb ( talk • contribs)
I know we've talked about getting a new favicon before mainly because the current one is in use by Wiktionary and is not the most appealing, especially the white background. We didn't do anything before because of out lack of participation and good ideas. I took some of the criticism from last time and worked out a new one, how does it look?-- penubag ( talk) 00:58, 21 September 2008 (UTC)
→ |
I've been thinking about the issue myself, and I myself dislike the traditional W because the white block background looks like someone who designed it has never heard of transparency. My proposal is that we keep basically the same logo, but utilise transparency and a bit of rounding. Like this:
→ |
Thoughts? — ^.^ citation needed 09:43, 21 September 2008 (UTC)
How about these versions?
→ → |
— ^.^ citation needed 11:54, 21 September 2008 (UTC)
Here is a nice improved favicon that I had made a while ago:
Cacycle ( talk) 01:39, 25 September 2008 (UTC)
How about ? -- NE2 06:28, 25 September 2008 (UTC)
Apparently, most of the former featured articles got demoted because the featured article criteria get stricter, rather than because articles deteriorate. I think we should add a list in which all featured articles are sorted by the date when they were promoted, or when their last featured article review was closed. For example:
(This could be broken across several pages, one per year, if the resulting page were too big.) When an article is demoted, the corresponding item would be simply removed, and when it successfully passes a FAR, the entry would be moved to the current date. This way, people could easily look for the articles which haven't undergone a FAR for the longest time, and consider nominating them for FAR. -- A r m y 1 9 8 7 ! ! ! 08:49, 24 September 2008 (UTC)
Hello everyone!
I am a new intern at the Wikimedia Foundation and I have started a blog to keep everyone up-to-date with what is going on at the office. Let me know what you want to hear about and leave me feedback!
http://welcometowiki.wordpress.com/ is the blog. —Preceding
unsigned comment added by
71.198.187.67 (
talk)
Related to: Wikipedia:PEREN#Allow_watchlisting_individual_sections_of_a_page
Any chance that we can get the Village Pump, AFI, etc opened up to AfD/RfA/FA style subpages? It would make opening a discussion a touch harder, but greatly simplify closing one on AFI and allow for per-section watchlists of both pages. Would require a bit of a redesign, but it shouldn't be that hard - The templates are largely already written for the aforementioned processees. Don't really need a way to "close" a pump discussion, so that one can be greatly simplified.
On a related note, is MediaWiki capable of expanding the functionality of the "New Section" link to automatically create these new sub-pages (on AfD/RfA/whatever) and auto-populate it with any necessary template text? That would make all of these processes and a broken up VP & AFI much more newbie accessible. MrZaius talk 03:13, 26 September 2008 (UTC)
Per Anomie's comment, I'd definitely like to not have to bite the newbies. Anyone familiar with Mediawiki enough to know if an admin or bureaucrat can extend the functionality of the "New Section" button to automagically create the new page and prefill it with a tracking template? Doesn't seem like it'd be hard, but does seem like it might require dev intervention. Definitely warranted, one way or the other though - It'd be incredibly nice to have, and would lower the bar at AfD and FA far more than it would raise it here. MrZaius talk 13:00, 26 September 2008 (UTC)
There are several automated programs that allow users to make mass edits to Wikipedia, such as Huggle, Autowikibrowser, Vandalproof, and others. These programs can allow vandals and inexperienced editors to do quite a bit of damage so the maintainers of these programs usually have an authorization system in place where editors request access, moderators/maintainers review the request and the editor's history, approve/decline the application and add approved users to an "access list".
The problem is that these approval mechanisms are time consuming and the lists of requests often get backlogged. The Vandalproof maintainers have suspended applications because of this (and because they think Huggle is better). Huggle avoids this problem by checking to see if the user is a member of the Rollbacker user group. This is a good solution and makes sense for Huggle since it is a "rollbacking" tool but it wouldn't make sense for some of the others such as AWB and it risks making rollback rights a bigger deal then it was designed to be.
I think the solution is a new usergroup, a suggested name might be "tools". This would basically be a dummy group and wouldn't provide any additional privileges on Wikipedia but programs like AWB could check to see if a user is a member of this group before it functions for them. The maintainers of these tools wouldn't have to have a complicated constantly backlogged approval mechanism and users wouldn't have to seek approval for every tool they wish to use. They would only have to apply for the "tools" bit once on " request for permissions". -- Ron Ritzman ( talk) 20:59, 27 September 2008 (UTC)
I agree with Z-man that creating a new usergroup for this is not such a great ideal but why don't you instead merge the approved user pages, that would be basicaly the same, instead of having the list of users approved for each tool read off different pages for each one why not just a single master page, that is a much easier solution. - Icewedge ( talk) 23:57, 29 September 2008 (UTC)
The articles Cap and trade with and without hyphens are currently redirects to Emissions trading. But the cap-and-trade system is also used for things like hunting and fishing licenses, radio spectrum broadcast licenses, and are the natural way to limit automated stock trading volume on stock exchanges. [1] [2] [3]
How does one go about rescuing a redirect like this? Can you please help show by example? Thank you. Orange Knight of Passion ( talk) 05:03, 30 September 2008 (UTC)
This page contains discussions that have been archived from Village pump (proposals). Please do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to revive any of these discussions, either start a new thread or use the talk page associated with that topic.
< Older discussions · Archives: A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z, AA, AB, AC, AD, AE, AF, AG, AH, AI, AJ, AK, AL, AM, AN, AO, AP, AQ, AR · 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193, 194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211
Disclaimer: This is just an idea that's been floating in my mind. I do not have a full-scale proposal nor have I thought about major flaws very much.
I have been wondering, if it wasn't better to code the deletion-process into the software somehow. Currently when you notice a page that either meets WP:CSD or WP:PROD or warrants a AfD for other reasons, you use {{ db}}, {{ prod}} or {{ afd}} to notify people of it. Problem is, as I have noticed, that those editor's, whose articles are tagged as such, may remove those templates and sometimes this allows them to stall or even avoid deletion because when a speedy-tag is removed, it needs to be re-added for an admin to notice about the speedy-worthiness of this article. So I wondered, if that could be changed. The de-wiki uses a process to mark revisions as stable. While I do not think that process will be much use here, a similar idea could solve the deletion problem:
Instead of marking versions as stable, we could use such marking to mark pages as deletable. Like this: An established user (autoconfirmed) can tick the box "mark this article for deletion" and is then able to select the process, i.e. Speedy (with criteria), Prod (with reason) or AfD. The marking can only be removed by this user or an admin. Admins could also set articles to never be marked as deletable (like a deletable=sysop flag). That way no especially created accounts could try and stall deletion of their pages and we could avoid edit wars about such tags because an admin will decide if the tag is to stay in place and that's it.
Okay, that's roughly my idea. I now accept all insults as to why this is a bad idea and all flaws pointed out to me. Please be gentle ;-) So Why 08:01, 4 September 2008 (UTC)
As implemented, speedy tags can be reviewed by anyone with the appropriate rights (not necessarily the right to delete pages), but can be objected to and endorsed by regular users, which advise the decision of whoever reviews speedy deletion. For prod, any objection automatically turns it into a deletion discussion. The nifty part is that we can separate the review rights for speedies, AfDs and prods, so we can let anybody half-trusted with decent judgement delete expired prods, and we can restrict closure of discussions to more experienced users. It's up for testing at my test wiki, if anybody's interested. — Werdna • talk 13:26, 4 September 2008 (UTC)
Well, how would you have the system I've developed modified? I'm very open to ideas. — Werdna • talk 08:14, 6 September 2008 (UTC)
I think the watchlist would be a lot more useful if it had options: 1. to show only edits since the user's last edit to an article 2. to show only edits since the last time the user viewed the article That would save a lot of time for people who have several articles on their watchlist. Bubba73 (talk), 02:03, 7 September 2008 (UTC)
Many Wikipedia pages on educational institutions routinely include a Notable Alumni section. This section is in general a list of the names of persons who were supposedly alumni of the institution about which the article deals with. Brief indications of the achievements of the individuals are also sometimes provided. Such scanty information does not help one to place the individuals in the spacio-temporal evolution of the institution. Moreover, immediate nonavailability of further facts makes verifiability difficult. To make the Notable Alumni section an authentic historical document I suggest that the following particulars about the claimed alumni should necessarily be provided in the section (the data may be given in the form of a table with appropriate headings):
It is also suggested that when judging the quality of a Wikipedia article on an educational institution due weightage be given for preparing the Notable Alumni section conforming to the above guidelines. Krishnachandranvn ( talk) 01:44, 9 September 2008 (UTC)
Wikipedia should have an intelligent App Button.
Basically how it works is it allows people to display wikipedia articles on their website. But instead of just displaying a url, it will display the first few sentences of the article, along with the main photo on the wikipedia article and a 'click here to read more' link.
This feature would be useful for musicians,actors etc, who have websites and they would be able to put this intelligent App Button on there.
So every wikipedia article should have a button saying "add this to your website" and when users click on it some html code will be displayed. Users then copy and paste this code into their website.
The intelligent App Button should be the size of about 410x530 pixels. The first few sentences could be displayed at the top, followed by the main photo, then a wikipedia logo, then the 'click here to read more', then a wikipedia logo. The main photo would have to be scaled down so it doesn't take up too much space and the text size may have to be a smaller font size too.
The intelligent App Button should automatically update the first few sentences of an article and main photo if it changes.
Wikipedia should work with record companies so people can see what the intelligent App Button would look like on a musician's website. Danielspencer2 ( talk) 04:28, 9 September 2008 (UTC)
Alot of musician's websites already list their wikipedia url's anyway. Soulja boy's official website lists his wikipedia article url there. As for this being open to abuse, well it could be solved by instead of automatically updating the button when an article changes, the button could be automatically updated every 15 minutes which is more than enough time for someone to repair an article and ban the user who used the article for promotion. As for this not being easy to develop, myspace and youtube already offer a simple copy and paste html code feature for their videos to be embedded on external websites. Danielspencer2 ( talk) 02:40, 10 September 2008 (UTC)
Doesn't copyright law say that as long as the copyright infringed thing is removed when a host is notified it's fine? So if a copyright infringement has occured i am sure the wikipedia editors will correct it within 24 hours. Danielspencer2 ( talk) 07:39, 10 September 2008 (UTC)
Agreed that this would promote abuse, and really if one wants to scrape WP for content an even mildly intelligent web developer should be able to. If one is interested in this though, an account on the toolserver should be able to produce an rss backend for article "exerpts" I would think. then pull the data server side w/ something like magpie rss or similar, or if you want it REALLY live, a simple Flash (yuk) or JS could pull the data. And why call it an "intelligent app button" ??? ./zro (⠠⠵) 09:49, 10 September 2008 (UTC)
We have an option that can prompt us for an edit summary in preferences. Is it possible to make something like this to prompt for the signature in talk pages? I guess it is hard (maybe impossible) since it should be checked from the edit box itself and not from a different box as for the edit summary and more work should be done to check for this, but it would be really helpful if there was something like that. Sorry if this has been discussed before, but I didn't find anything like this. Chamal Talk ± 13:04, 9 September 2008 (UTC)
~~~~
as long as it isn't <nowiki>~~~~</nowiki>. Then there would need to be the "don't sign" check box. It seems like it should be simple to implement. --
Imperator3733 (
talk) 15:58, 9 September 2008 (UTC)Congratulations to the devs on adding the "active users" count to special:statistics. The very large ratio of user accounts to admins is often used to argue that (i) adminship is a Very Big Deal and (ii) we are hopelessly under-manned on the admin front, but the ratio of active users to admins (about 7:1) gives exactly the opposite impression. To make the comparison really fair we need to list "active" admins as well as "active" users, so here are my two proposals:
The last point is crucial as with different definitions you can get estimates varying by many orders of magnitude: active = has edited at least once gives about 3 million users; active = has edited within the last minute gives about 200 users. (FWIW, the current estimate about 11,000 active users seems reasonably in line with, for instance, the WMF board election eligibility requirements). PaddyLeahy ( talk) 14:55, 11 September 2008 (UTC)
I do a lot of cleaning up links to disambiguation pages, and Wikipedia Cleaner has a nifty feature called "Local Watch List". For those not familiar with it, it allows you to maintain a list of pages and store a numerical record of how many other pages are linking to each of them, differentiating between articles, templates, and all pages in total (User, Talk, User Talk, Image, Portal, etc.). Then, when you next update that list, it'll indicate where the number of incoming links has increased or decreased from the figure you stored before. If it's decreased, that's great; if it's increased, then you know there's work to be done.
For dab clean-up, this is a great tool, because you can then go in and address new incoming links immediately. However, it's limited in that it doesn't indicate which links are the new ones — if there are a few pages with links that you haven't been able to fix before, new pages will blend in among them. It also requires launching Wikipedia Cleaner (which isn't working well at the moment) and running the update, when some disambiguations are simple enough that I wouldn't want to bother using this external tool.
What I'm wondering is whether it would be possible to create a different spin on this feature within Wikipedia itself? It would be more like the existing Watchlist, but instead of showing you edits to the pages you're watching, it would show you new incoming links to the pages you're watching. Beyond disambiguation pages, I could also see this as being useful for users working within various projects — a new incoming link to a page that you follow within your project might indicate another article that could also fall under the project.
Mlaffs ( talk) 20:08, 12 September 2008 (UTC)
Does this exist? (If so, sorry for posting). If not, I think it would be nice to know when a lot of new pages are falling under CSD and such. Lәo( βǃʘʘɱ) 17:28, 13 September 2008 (UTC)
The Body of Knowledge of Medical Science has become so large that no one physician can be familiar with all the diseases, symptoms and treatments. Even dividing up the information into specialties and specialists there are often cases that slip through the cracks when problem is obscure enough that the supervising physician is not familiar with it, or the diagnosis is missed through human error.
In addition, the general public's access to affordable medical care, both in the USA and other advanced countries, as well as developing and poorer countries are major longstanding social problems.
I propose a Medical-Wikipedia project to organize and distribute the known body of medical science regarding medical disease, symptoms and treatments in a form available to all. This could be used by medical professionals to organize the diagnosis process; for research and instruction, and a certain level of supervision.
Tis could eventually be used as a substitute for professional medical care where it is unavailable and/or unaffordable. It would help break the stranglehold on medical care that keeps many people from accessing medical care even in countries with advanced medical care industries. It would help ordinary people keep abreast of the medical professionals in learning enough to be able to manage their own care, instead of just agreeing with what the doctor ordered.
Doctors are not perfect, they are human just like everyone else. They need the help, the patients and their loved ones need the help, and this has been technologically feasible for at least a decade. I actually had heard of a pilot system like this around 15 years ago to help train interns; but it was never fully developed, and seems to have disappeared.
This is a project that could have major benefits for the entire human race. Obviously the information would need to be absolutely accurate, so input would need to be carefully managed, not quite the 'anyone can contribute' aspect of Wikipedia. But the organization and distribution of the information, and the benefit to all are very much in the Wikipedia sphere of influence, and I think the Wikipedia Foundation should take up this project.
Jim Baranski, Superior Technologies, Shalom Orchard Winery & B&B, Franklin ME
Would it be possible to modify the page history so that it will color the block of entries from the top downward that resulted in no net change to the page content? That is, if the edits consisted of a series of changes that were each reverted, I would like to be able to see that at a glance (via the background color) rather than having to perform a compare. (I don't always trust the history message to let me know the revert was done properly.) Instead, I would like to just look at the last retained change(s) on downward. In fact, shading any edit/revert sets that result in no net change would be helpful. Thanks.— RJH ( talk) 19:43, 10 September 2008 (UTC)
There are currently several discussions underway to rename various category hierarchies for various kinds of settlements or communities. There are three umbrella nominations for renaming at Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2008 September 14 and there is also Wikipedia:Categories_for_discussion/Log/2008_September_13#Categories for 'place' in the UK are slowly getting into a mess. There really needs to be a community-wide debate on this issue, and I hope that some with a bit experience in such largescale consensus processes can get involved to help organize this debate and, if possible, guide it through to an encompassing consensus-based decision. __ meco ( talk) 12:30, 17 September 2008 (UTC)
Do you know what pisses me off? When somebody moves a page to "Hagger!?!?!?!" and that nonsense gets added to my watchlist. I have to remove pages like that from my watchlist all the time.
I have a solution for this, make an option in "my preferences" that says "Add pages to your watchlist that somebody moves" and uncheck that box. Not only is this annoying me when somebody is vandalism-moving pages, also I want to MANUALLY add pages to my watchlist. I don't want it to be done automaticlly, because like I said, Hagger is bad, and is the main reason why I want to manually add moved pages to my watch list. TheBlazikenMaster ( talk) 14:20, 16 September 2008 (UTC)
on your watchlist. I imagine it is possible to do so, when you move a page, you get the option to watch it, why not just make that option more universal-- Jac16888 ( talk) 14:43, 16 September 2008 (UTC)
There is a discussion going on here about whether to change the name of the notability guideline. — Elipongo ( Talk contribs) 10:28, 18 September 2008 (UTC)
I have recently been browsing a lot of mathematical and scientific articles, and have noticed a problem with them. A great number of them make no sense whatsoever to the lay person. In what seems to be something of a Catch-22, the only people who might be able to understand some of these articles would be people who know all about the subject matter anyway and so wouldn't need to read them. As for the curious public who just want to learn a bit more about maths or physics, say, these articles will probably make no sense at all. For instance, of those of you reading my comment, how many can understand what the formulae in Lorentz transformation or Special relativity mean just by reading the articles?
You might argue that some knowledge of the subject matter is expected of those reading such articles, just like people who want to read Wikipedia articles in general need to know the alphabet, but I would say that some of these formulae are too complex not to warrant some sort of explanation.
I propose, then, that one of two things happen:
{{formula|[[Derivative|Differentiation]]|[[Matrix (mathematics)|Matrices]]}}
...would produce something along the lines of the box that is below in the article.
This article contains
formulae concerning: You might find it useful to read the articles on those types of formulae in order to fully understand this article. |
WP:MTAA seems to favour the first option wherever possible, but where it suggests that simplification is impossible and the article be left alone, could my second idea be used?
It Is Me Here ( talk) 16:47, 22 July 2008 (UTC)
For more information about this
formula, see: |
I support the idea of a derivitive of the {{ Too specialized}} template for maths and science articles. Obviously these articles have to be encyclopedic, but it's almost too encyclopedic, to the point where it barely makes sense if you know what I mean. Look at this quote from Special relativity:
"Special relativity reveals that c is not just the velocity of a certain phenomenon, namely the propagation of electromagnetic radiation (light)—but rather a fundamental feature of the way space and time are unified as spacetime. A consequence of this is that it is impossible for any particle that has mass to be accelerated to the speed of light."
This is one of those paragraphs that just makes you go "What?!" and makes you need to read it several times to actually form an understanding of it in your mind. I assume a lot of these articles are written by "experts", to the point where only said experts can actually understand them. I'm not saying to dumb things down. Don't dumb things down, as advanced things have to be explained in advanced ways, just clarify them and make things clearer. Sometimes it's just all in the language, and there is such a thing as a "language rich sentence". I support such a proposal mainly because I personally find these articles difficult to read, simply because it's just a little too much. Wikipedia needs to be accessible to everyone, including these articles. Obviously most readers should know basic maths in the same way they are expected to know basic English, but to expect them to learn all about advanced maths before reading about these articles is ridiculous and defeats the purpose of an encyclopedia. I'm not saying that articles need to teach things, just make things easier to understand. -- .: Alex :. 18:07, 22 July 2008 (UTC)
Some articles already link to indices and glossaries, such as Table of mathematical symbols and Glossary of group theory. Perhaps you could ask the various wikiprojects to create templates to make such linking easier. It is somewhat unlikely that all of the science and mathematics projects will want to use exactly the same text. JackSchmidt ( talk) 18:26, 22 July 2008 (UTC)
{{suggested wikibooks|book=Calculus|page=Differentiation}}
{{formula links|Derivative|Limit (mathematics)|Matrix (mathematics)}}
(outdent because my : key was getting tired) Same way you make anything "official" around here; ask if anyone has any concerns (this thread should provide that), then start using them once that's settled, then see if anyone brings up any other concerns (an ongoing process). Here's a concern to start you off; can you improve the wording on these any? If the template syntax is too arcane please go ahead and simplify it or ask me to explain. :-) -- tiny plastic Grey Knight ⊖ 14:35, 23 July 2008 (UTC)
I don't support the idea that we would add a special template just to say that a formula in an article includes a derivative. That's the sort of thing that can be handled in prose. We already link to wikibooks and wikiversity, when appropriate, in the "see also" sections of articles, so no additional templates are needed for them. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 20:38, 23 July 2008 (UTC)
(Outdent)As a compromise, how about adding categories (preferably hidden) like "Physics concepts dependent on an understanding of Matrices"? That gets the point across that you need to understand basic elements of algebra and precalculus without cluttering up the mainspace with unnecessary "gb2algebra" templates every time there's an equals sign in an article. Celarnor Talk to me 18:50, 24 July 2008 (UTC)
I myself have noticed this problem too. I am hoping to study Physics at University from October, so I would consider my "expertise" (if you can call it that!) to be in physics and maths topics, yet these are usually incredibly difficult to follow on Wikipedia, compared to other topics I like to read like Philosophy, Politics and History, on which I don't have a great deal of knowledge but can still follow. Deamon138 ( talk) 17:30, 4 August 2008 (UTC)
Large chunks of math articles in wikipedia *are* highly specialized. They cannot help but be -- it is not only the language and the notation, but the very concepts themselves that require mathematical maturity and repeated practice with the definitions and styles of a particular subfield, to understand. We cannot do otherwise - these concepts took hundreds of years to develop into their present form, and sadly their fundaments are often not in the culture, the way the fundamentals of things like laws and social norms are. It would be like trying to make an article on accounting understandable to somebody who can't add, or trying to make an article on civil procedure understandable to somebody from a tribal, pre-law society. To expect to understand a concept like special relativity on a quick, non-intensive readthrough for the first time is unreasonable. We do make efforts to make the articles accessible to technically literate laypeople (say, engineers with a mathematical bent), and goodness knows mathematicians are too frequently guilty of being more complicated than they need to be, but if you're going to create tags that essentially say "serious and arduous intellectual effort required to understand the full meaning of this article if you've never seen anything like it before," you might as well tag every non-biographical article in the math section, for all the good it will do. RayAYang ( talk) 06:30, 5 August 2008 (UTC)
posted by Arydberg Much of the above would go away if there was a link on the title page to the "simple english wikipedia" and a explanation that it was for beginners. Arydberg ( talk) 14:08, 28 August 2008 (UTC)
We've had this discussion at the math WikiProject already. Before anyone starts editing based on the discussion above, please read Wikipedia talk:WikiProject_Mathematics/Archive 38#article difficulty level. Ozob ( talk) 18:28, 5 August 2008 (UTC)
This a very old debate. So I'm going to go with Euclid on this one. I think adding templates and other flying widget spam to pages doesn't help anything. We try very hard to make our articles accessible. If, like King Ptolemy, you refuse to make the effort, I suggest you just tune the TV to the animal channel. Loisel ( talk) 19:19, 5 August 2008 (UTC)
Unsurprisingly, mathematics has become more difficult since Euclid... Also, The Elements is a masterpiece of mathematical writing that was unsurpassed for about two thousand years. Loisel ( talk) 22:13, 5 August 2008 (UTC)
The initial poster wrote:
Can someone PLEASE cite some examples of this? I have seen and edited FAR more math articles on Wikipedia than all but very few people. I've seen this particular complain stated repeatedly. I don't know any examples. I don't know of any ATTEMPTS to cite any. The initial poster above mentions only Lorentz transformation and special relativity. Those don't appear to be attempts to cite examples of the "catch-22" complained of. Is there some other that is? Michael Hardy ( talk) 15:51, 7 August 2008 (UTC)
Given a sample consisting of independent observations X1,..., Xn of a random vector X ∈ Rp×1 (a p×1 column), an unbiased estimator of the covariance matrix
is the sample covariance matrix
where
is the sample mean.
That is not something the layperson would grasp in that form. Personally I've seen some of the symbols before in statistics, but I can't follow that. Bear in mind that is just one example I found with a quick look, there are hundreds more. No offence, but since you are a huge editor of maths articles you are likely to say "I don't know any examples" since I'm guessing you understand the maths already? Deamon138 ( talk) 16:07, 7 August 2008 (UTC)
It was complained initially that articles were written in such a way that only those who already knew the material could understand them.
I don't believe that.
Then it was complained that articles are written in such a way that lay readers could not understand them.
That is true. But it's not a problem.
Then it was complained that articles are written in such a way that lay readers couldn't tell what you had to know to read them and what the general subject matter area was.
That is too often true, and I am the foremost complainer about that problem on Wikipedia. I have probably also done more to remedy that problem than anyone else. Fortunately, however, it is a problem that does not afflict most articles. I'm talking about articles whose opening sentence is something like "Consider a sequence {Tn} of bounded linear operators on a separable Banach space B." The lay reader can't tell whether that's about theology or chemistry or psychoanalysis or international trade negotiations. I am foremost among those who have been objecting to that way of starting articles.
Someone blamed me for the abrupt opening sentence in estimation of covariance matrices, which said:
Michael Hardy ( talk) 13:43, 11 August 2008 (UTC)
Indeed. Writing them to be accessible to as wide an audience as possible often leaves them in a state where lay readers cannot understand them. Not always, and indeed sometimes articles can be improved in this regard, but still there are lots of cases where an article written to be accesssible to as wide an audience as possible is one that lay readers won't understand. Michael Hardy ( talk) 17:17, 11 August 2008 (UTC)
Here is an assortment of points which may be helpful. Their juxtaposition with each other is not intended to indicate any particular interconnection beyond their common relationship to the problem under discussion.
At this stage of the discussion, I do not have a preference from among the various options, which include the following.
Any one or combination of those options is acceptable to me. Also, the following may be helpful.
Earlier on this page, you gave an example of an annotated equation with links to other articles in Wikipedia. I have copied and edited it to appear as shown below, although the spacing still needs improvement. I have removed the first
monomial of
Euler's identity from the annotation. It is used in
mathematics stubs. I removed it for two reasons: (1) in order to simplify the editing, and (2) because it seemed both inappropriate and unnecessary that an equation annotation have a stub symbol (either for a general mathematics stub or for any of the more specific mathematics stubs listed at
Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Stub types).
|
For more information on how I did this, you can see HTML element and b:HTML Programming/Tables.
Here are some more links (a few of them internal, most of them external), some of them listed under headings composed of Google search terms. I am listing them here because I believe they have a possibility (even if small) of helping Wikipedia editors to make mathematics articles more accessible to readers. (Even if they do not help in that way, then their presence here could still be of interest in other ways to mathematics editors reading this section.)
"explaining difficult mathematics"
"gender differences mathematics"
Here are some more links which may help Wikipedia editors to make mathematics articles more accessible.
I have sent a message to a famous educational communicator, requesting advice from that person to be given here to help us in reaching a consensus.
The following 17 pages are selected from the top 300 search results from my Google Advanced Search for all the words "wikipedia mathematics articles village pump" within the site "en.wikipedia.org", or, in a few cases, are pages linked from those results. I have left them in the order of the search results, because the first results seem to be the most relevant and most useful to this discussion.
From my Wikipedia search for "mathematics articles" by using the Search button, I selected 48 pages. In the left column, they are listed in the order in which I found them. In the right column, they are loosely sorted for convenience.
Although I found many articles about individual mathematicians among the search results, I singled out
Paul Erdős because of his prolific collaboration with other mathematicians in writing articles about mathematics. If his collaboration was in many diverse fields of mathematics, then his work might provide some clues to making Wikipedia mathematics articles more accessible, not only to non-mathematicians, but also to mathematicians specializing in fields outside those of the articles.
A related challenge in explaining mathematics was met in
one-room schools. In a one-room school, a teacher taught academic basics to five to eight grade levels of elementary-age boys and girls. Maybe an understanding of the skills used by the teacher in shifting attention from one level to another, while maintaining appropriate instructions for each intended audience, can assist writers and editors of mathematics articles for Wikipedia.
Because my search found the
list of paradoxes, it seems fitting to include these other articles, which are closely related to that one and to this discussion.
Here are some more mathematics websites, which might help Wikipedia editors to make mathematics articles more accessible to a general readership.
(Incidentally, these together with others in the previous subsection of this section are probably sufficient
for a
list of mathematics websites or a
list of mathematical websites.)
From column 4 ("Proposals") of Wikipedia:Village pump archive#October 2004 - October 2007, I visited each page linked, searched for the character string "math", and selected the following 29 sections as having some relevance to the challenge of making mathematics articles more accessible to a general readership. The dates are from the discussions themselves, and do not necessarily agree with the corresponding wikified dates on the index page.
Proposal; Adding Wikiatlas to Wikipedia's array of reference materials. Lack of an atlas is a glaring omission. Any basic personal library's reference section starts with an encyclopedia, a dictionary and an atlas. Slightly better ones add a thesaurus and a book of quotations and possibly a general world history, then other reference books tailored to the individuals interests. Wiki has moved on to the thesaurus and quotes before covering the basics. Wikibooks is even beginning to fill in the the individual interests niche. Done properly this is a big project, hence a daunting one. As atlas's are graphic by nature few of wikipedia's current resources can be applied to the project, although wikipedia does have some good maps available to it. Wikipedia itself was, and is, a daunting project, yet was deemed worthwhile enough to do. Another argument against taking up this project is that the resource is available elsewhere on the internet. This is simply not true. Google maps, mapquest and the like are great for finding an address or getting directions, the CIA site has very nice current political maps, and looking at satellite photos of your neighborhood or where the latest typhoon has struck is way cool. However these are only the smallest part of what a good electronic atlas could be. Try finding a elevation map of Europe and the Mediteranian basin without cities or political boundaries. Aside from being a good thing in and of itself wikiatlas would be a terrific support tool for wikipedia. For example there is a very nice map in wikipedia of ancient Greek and Pheonician colonies. The creator must have gone to a great deal of trouble to create it so he could include it in his article. If he could summon up a map of the area involved that was copyright free his task would have been much easier. The difficulty in finding appropriate maps has certainly caused some editors to skip adding a map altogether, or reduce the quantity of maps included in a given article. I am surprised I could not find a reference to the addition of an atlas in the wiki pages. I would be even more surprised if I was the first to suggest it. If there is a discussion of the idea somewhere in wikiworld a pointer to the area would be appreciated. For those interested in the idea this is how I think it should work, ideally. Opening page is a globe, that can be manipulated with the pointer to show any face. A button would allow the view to be toggled back and forth between a flat projection or globe view. A slider would allow zooming in or out. Another slider would be used to go back and forth in time. A series of buttons would turn on or off a number of filters for borders, roads, rails, cities, elevation, climate, population, language, satellite image etc. The borders of the map could be adjusted to show exactly the area of interest. A couple of buttons would allow printing or saving to an image file, at screen size or any scale multiplier the user selects. An area and time period could have specialty maps attached, and if browsing the right area a specialty map available button would appear. when pushed the specialty map pop up. For example; if browsing Asia in the 1250-1270 period a a button would appear that lead to a map of Marco Polo's travels. One more button would lead to the index page. A place could be searched for through all history or the search could be narrowed to a certain era, continent, or nation. An option to show the resulting place or it's location would be available. For example a search for Toronto would show a map of Toronto, or a map of southern Ontario and north eastern USA centered on Toronto. Links to articles in Wikipedia could be added, so clicking on a nation's name would link to the article about the nation. And naturally Wikipedia articles could link to Wikipedia.
-- JoSo ( talk) 07:19, 15 September 2008 (UTC)
I think I've seen this idea suggested a half-dozen or so times over the years, but nothing has ever come of it to my knowledge. I know there is a project request someplace venue on meta:, perhaps you could find other supporters of the idea there? As for why there is no Wikiatlas, if I had to guess I would assume it's due to software issues. Programmer hours are the rarest of all volunteer resources, I recall reading that we write a dozen FAs for every fulfilled bug request (and most bug requests are quite minor). -- erachima talk 10:09, 15 September 2008 (UTC)
(in re: to the "more FAs than bugs" comment): Did enwiki churn out 1056 FAs last week? Because 88 bugs were marked as FIXED. :) ^ demon [omg plz] 20:14, 18 September 2008 (UTC)
I'd like to have this extension enabled on our wiki. It has proven to be an effective tool for cleaning up vandalism and quickly reversing disruption on other Wikimedia wikis such as Meta and Commons. Basically, the extension allows an administrator to delete in bulk, the pages created by a vandal. - Rjd0060 ( talk) 21:38, 17 September 2008 (UTC)
I'd like to suggest that some mention of WP:YFA (hopefully avoiding being too patronizing, in case it hits experienced editors making a stupid mistake) should be added to most (not all) of the CSD warning templates. Any thoughts on which or inclinations against doing so? Seems like it might be more productive than just slapping users down without making any productive suggestions. MrZaius talk 12:03, 21 September 2008 (UTC)
Currently, users are able to remove warnings that they receive from their talk pages. However, if they continue to do this, they could conceivably vandalize forever and nobody would know unless they were continually caught by the same user or the person reverting the vandalism checked the edit history of every user (which would be time consuming). I'd like to propose that users not be able to remove warnings from their talk page. It just makes it easier to keep track of how much vandalism a person has done without having to go through a contribution history.
(Note: I was told that they are allowed to do this by another user. If they aren't, then ignore this.) KJS77 Join the Revolution 00:08, 22 September 2008 (UTC)
After seeing ban discussions like Koh's, Kurt's Scetpre's, Steve Crossin's, and Prom3th3n's, I've written up User:MBisanz/RfBan as a proposed way to better handle such discussions in the future. Please comment at the talk page. MBisanz talk 00:20, 22 September 2008 (UTC)
Recently, I posted a message at Wikipedia:Reference desk/Language and, because of the length of the section heading, I did not have any space to provide an edit summary--there was not even enough space for one character. Should there be a length limit for section headings? What is the best formula for deciding what that length limit should be?
Here is a temporary link:
Wikipedia:Reference desk/Language#I am looking for a term that is used to describe the time wasting practice of pronouncing an acronym that takes longer to pronounce than if one simply pronounced the words that were initialized? {
sic}.
Here is a perpetual link:
Wikipedia:Reference desk/Language (September 17) "I am looking for a term that is used to describe the time wasting practice of pronouncing an acronym that takes longer to pronounce than if one simply pronounced the words that were initialized?" {
sic}.
I would like to remind people that the proposal to move Main Page is still ongoing. It is currently proposed that Main Page be moved to a new namespace. For more information, please see WP:VPR/PP#New namespace?. It would be good if more people are involved in this decision. -- Imperator3733 ( talk) 14:29, 23 September 2008 (UTC)
It would be very informative (and benificial for musicians) if under the song details infobox the ability to list the key signature of a song was added for singles or individual song pages.
As it currently stands, articles on individual issues of a comic book series are not allowed on wikipedia. I propose that this be changed. My principal reason is this: the current policies do not allow for adequate coverage of comics-related material.
There's only so much plot detail you can cover in a character or series page without that page veering off topic and becoming filled with extraneous detail. Additionally, if one wants to find information about a certain event in a comic book, they will have to spend time poring over multiple pages covering the series and characters in question; maybe they'll find what they're looking for, maybe they won't. A neat and tidy solution is to simply allow these pages. I think they would prove to be a valuable addition to this encyclopedia. In some cases, graphic novel pages fill this need, but this is an inadequate compromise because many fine comics have never been collected into a graphic novel and, in addition, graphic novel pages are routinely deleted on grounds of notability.
Further support: television episodes are widely featured throughout wikipedia, and in many cases have become featured articles. This is comparable to the issue of individual comic book issues. Yes, there are low-quality TV episode articles, but there are many more high-quality ones. I think most people would agree that these articles add to wikipedia quite a bit, and I think that, given the chance, comic book issue pages will do the same. Cerebellum ( talk) 23:31, 23 September 2008 (UTC)
I use to contribute to a smaller wiki and think spreading new policies or agreed upon guidelines would be quite easy if administrators could simply type them (or a link to them) into an editor and then send them to registered users, who would see the news message appear on top of the wiki page they are watching in the same way they are notified of a new message on their talk pages. Just adding new policies or guidelines to the help section or wherever they belong might make them go unnoticed. I'm not sure if this made sense for the main wiki though.-- Emaster82 ( talk) 01:31, 24 September 2008 (UTC)
A week or two ago I proposed that the definition of "active user" on special:statistics was made clear, and some kind user did so: viz the template was edited to state that active means "has edited in the last 30 days". Just about as soon as that thread was archived from here, special:statistics was radically re-designed and the information was lost again. Can someone put it back? E.g. by defining the term in Wikipedia:statistics and linking to it from the special:statistics template (I have no idea where the latter is located or I'd do it myself). PaddyLeahy ( talk) 15:02, 24 September 2008 (UTC)
I'd like to propose adding the following namespaces to MediaWiki:Robots.txt to prevent their indexing by search engines
There is no encyclopedic content on any of these pages and all but a tiny fraction are unwatched. Frequently drive-by vandals leave attack pages in these namespaces, knowing that it is unlikely anyone will see them. Since they are not used much for legitimate purposes (other than a few template and mediawiki talk pages), there will not be much collateral damage from adding them to the robots.txt file. MBisanz talk 01:50, 15 September 2008 (UTC)
As a technical note, though, Ilmari is correct. This would be implemented in the configuration files, not on a local page. -- MZMcBride ( talk) 21:46, 17 September 2008 (UTC)
There is a proposal to amend the bot policy regarding whether or not administrators need approval to run bots under their account. All are invited to comment. Prodego talk 14:51, 21 September 2008 (UTC)
why dosnt wiki cover the lesser religions like i'm the Alimbic religion theres only a little on it and i added that bit.-- Mindoshawn ( talk) 18:20, 24 September 2008 (UTC)
Originally proposed and discussed here ( WT:AFD).
If an article is listed on AFD for 5 days and...
Then it may, at the closing admin's discretion, be treated like an expired prod. The admin deletes it with no prejudice against recreation and the article is undeleted upon request, noting this in his closing statement and in the deletion log. I think this would be a better alternative to constantly relisting nominations over and over again until there are enough !votes to make a call. Note that this should only be one option available to the closing admin. He could still relist or close "no consensus" etc. if he feels that's best.
Of those who objected, the main concern was the short window available to someone who would wish the article be kept to participate in the deletion discussion. Other business might keep him away from Wikipedia while " his" article is silently deleted. I am assuming the same objection was raised when the proposed deletion system was first being discussed. The answer was to make such deletions very easy to undo. Such an article would be restored upon request or could be recreated without being subject to CSD G4. I'm proposing the same thing here. -- Ron Ritzman ( talk) 02:19, 16 September 2008 (UTC)
Isn't it possible that this AfD was already prodded, and was taken to AfD because someone objected? It doesn't strike me as impossible that someone contested a prod, and then didn't follow up on the AfD discussion. Personally, I think if something doesn't meet speedy deletion criteria and there isn't a discussion leading to a delete decision, then it should default to keep and not delete. Avruch T 00:53, 17 September 2008 (UTC)
I think it might be nice if there was a count of the number of views for a given page so as to see the popularity of one topic over another.
Just a suggestion... —Preceding unsigned comment added by Crsteinb ( talk • contribs)
I know we've talked about getting a new favicon before mainly because the current one is in use by Wiktionary and is not the most appealing, especially the white background. We didn't do anything before because of out lack of participation and good ideas. I took some of the criticism from last time and worked out a new one, how does it look?-- penubag ( talk) 00:58, 21 September 2008 (UTC)
→ |
I've been thinking about the issue myself, and I myself dislike the traditional W because the white block background looks like someone who designed it has never heard of transparency. My proposal is that we keep basically the same logo, but utilise transparency and a bit of rounding. Like this:
→ |
Thoughts? — ^.^ citation needed 09:43, 21 September 2008 (UTC)
How about these versions?
→ → |
— ^.^ citation needed 11:54, 21 September 2008 (UTC)
Here is a nice improved favicon that I had made a while ago:
Cacycle ( talk) 01:39, 25 September 2008 (UTC)
How about ? -- NE2 06:28, 25 September 2008 (UTC)
Apparently, most of the former featured articles got demoted because the featured article criteria get stricter, rather than because articles deteriorate. I think we should add a list in which all featured articles are sorted by the date when they were promoted, or when their last featured article review was closed. For example:
(This could be broken across several pages, one per year, if the resulting page were too big.) When an article is demoted, the corresponding item would be simply removed, and when it successfully passes a FAR, the entry would be moved to the current date. This way, people could easily look for the articles which haven't undergone a FAR for the longest time, and consider nominating them for FAR. -- A r m y 1 9 8 7 ! ! ! 08:49, 24 September 2008 (UTC)
Hello everyone!
I am a new intern at the Wikimedia Foundation and I have started a blog to keep everyone up-to-date with what is going on at the office. Let me know what you want to hear about and leave me feedback!
http://welcometowiki.wordpress.com/ is the blog. —Preceding
unsigned comment added by
71.198.187.67 (
talk)
Related to: Wikipedia:PEREN#Allow_watchlisting_individual_sections_of_a_page
Any chance that we can get the Village Pump, AFI, etc opened up to AfD/RfA/FA style subpages? It would make opening a discussion a touch harder, but greatly simplify closing one on AFI and allow for per-section watchlists of both pages. Would require a bit of a redesign, but it shouldn't be that hard - The templates are largely already written for the aforementioned processees. Don't really need a way to "close" a pump discussion, so that one can be greatly simplified.
On a related note, is MediaWiki capable of expanding the functionality of the "New Section" link to automatically create these new sub-pages (on AfD/RfA/whatever) and auto-populate it with any necessary template text? That would make all of these processes and a broken up VP & AFI much more newbie accessible. MrZaius talk 03:13, 26 September 2008 (UTC)
Per Anomie's comment, I'd definitely like to not have to bite the newbies. Anyone familiar with Mediawiki enough to know if an admin or bureaucrat can extend the functionality of the "New Section" button to automagically create the new page and prefill it with a tracking template? Doesn't seem like it'd be hard, but does seem like it might require dev intervention. Definitely warranted, one way or the other though - It'd be incredibly nice to have, and would lower the bar at AfD and FA far more than it would raise it here. MrZaius talk 13:00, 26 September 2008 (UTC)
There are several automated programs that allow users to make mass edits to Wikipedia, such as Huggle, Autowikibrowser, Vandalproof, and others. These programs can allow vandals and inexperienced editors to do quite a bit of damage so the maintainers of these programs usually have an authorization system in place where editors request access, moderators/maintainers review the request and the editor's history, approve/decline the application and add approved users to an "access list".
The problem is that these approval mechanisms are time consuming and the lists of requests often get backlogged. The Vandalproof maintainers have suspended applications because of this (and because they think Huggle is better). Huggle avoids this problem by checking to see if the user is a member of the Rollbacker user group. This is a good solution and makes sense for Huggle since it is a "rollbacking" tool but it wouldn't make sense for some of the others such as AWB and it risks making rollback rights a bigger deal then it was designed to be.
I think the solution is a new usergroup, a suggested name might be "tools". This would basically be a dummy group and wouldn't provide any additional privileges on Wikipedia but programs like AWB could check to see if a user is a member of this group before it functions for them. The maintainers of these tools wouldn't have to have a complicated constantly backlogged approval mechanism and users wouldn't have to seek approval for every tool they wish to use. They would only have to apply for the "tools" bit once on " request for permissions". -- Ron Ritzman ( talk) 20:59, 27 September 2008 (UTC)
I agree with Z-man that creating a new usergroup for this is not such a great ideal but why don't you instead merge the approved user pages, that would be basicaly the same, instead of having the list of users approved for each tool read off different pages for each one why not just a single master page, that is a much easier solution. - Icewedge ( talk) 23:57, 29 September 2008 (UTC)
The articles Cap and trade with and without hyphens are currently redirects to Emissions trading. But the cap-and-trade system is also used for things like hunting and fishing licenses, radio spectrum broadcast licenses, and are the natural way to limit automated stock trading volume on stock exchanges. [1] [2] [3]
How does one go about rescuing a redirect like this? Can you please help show by example? Thank you. Orange Knight of Passion ( talk) 05:03, 30 September 2008 (UTC)