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So, by self-reference, you mean the word "Wikipedia"? That does seem like a good policy. What about links to Wikipedia subjects? Seems like those would break under forking, too.
Otherwise, this is just commonsense that nobody ever thought of. B-)
-- ESP 05:55 20 Jul 2003 (UTC)
So I assume this policy does not apply to disambiguation and the disambiguation pages boilerplate text?
Also how does it apply to stub boilerplate text? Are they still allowed because eventually the reference to Wikipedia will be removed? -- Popsracer 05:59 20 Jul 2003 (UTC)
So, just because I'm a big booster, I want to give a devil's advocate question. To wit: the stated reason for avoiding self-references is to make it easier to fork Wikipedia. I ask: how important is it to make it _easy_ to fork Wikipedia? The Wikipedia:Wikipedia namespace links, standard boilerplate, etc., makes our work on the project easier. How much pain do we have to go to to make downstream modifiers' lives easier? -- ESP 06:11 20 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Another question: what about the legal disclaimers, like not giving medical advice or legal advice? Do those fall under the boilerplate extension? Lastly, is there a technical solution for marking up "meta" information? For example, editorial comments, disclaimers, stub notices? -- ESP 06:22 20 Jul 2003 (UTC)
And another other question: what about references to the Talk: and User: namespaces? --
ESP 06:22 20 Jul 2003 (UTC)
This is a very misconceived rule IMO. It encourages the duplication of content in multiple articles, when a self-reference would refer people to the appropriate place. In practice, at worst this may mean that for some articles that forkers would have to edit them slightly to make them suitable as standalone pieces. Our first priority should be to build the best encyclopedia we can, and compromising that to make it marginally easier to fork seems a bad tradeoff. -- Robert Merkel 11:39 20 Jul 2003 (UTC)
I should however add that it is not all that common for self-references to be the best way to handle things and that other methods of providing links to other articles are often a better idea. I just don't want to remove them from the quiver for the times when they are necessary. -- Robert Merkel 11:43 20 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Personally, I prefer
it shows were the links lead and identify meta information. Even printed, it's probably understandable.-- User:Docu
Another question is, if we should remove redirects from the article namespace to the Wikipedia/User/talk namespaces or not. Often, they were created when moving articles there. -- User:Docu
Are there exceptions to the rule of "avoid self-references" ? Is the mention of "wikipedia talk" on the VFD disambig page flouting policy ? Jay 18:00, 11 Apr 2004 (UTC)
Actually, I think the VfD page is a good example were the self reference should stay. It is an important term here that needs explanation. Wikipedia would not be any harder to duplicate, if vfd explained that there is a certain on-line encyclopedia were these letters have a special meaning.
In the page Talk:VFD I have written more fully why this one should stay. Sander123 11:06, 10 May 2004 (UTC)
As long as the link is an external link, rather than a link to another namespace, it doesn't violate this policy. If you use a direct link there is a problem with duplication, because many duplicates exclude the Wikipedia namespace. anthony (see warning)
We could also avoid a template name like "In Wikipedia" and call it "In this project"; this is not needed for an uneditable copy (because not visible), but it might be better for a fork.-- Patrick 14:45, 6 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Should redirects from the article namespace be allowed to the Wikipedia/User namespaces? Same question was asked above without any response. Page in question is Wiki Canonization which redirects to Wikipedia:Canonicalization. Jay 21:06, 7 Jul 2004 (UTC)
I noticed that some new users make the mistake of using external links instead of wikilinks (like This instead of This). I made a list of possible such articles at User:Wmahan/Articles with self-references. Some of these might actually be valid external links (e.g. VFD), but any comments or help correcting them would be appreciated. Wmahan . 00:14, 2004 Sep 4 (UTC)
I'm one of the designers of Wikicode, a proposed pseudocode standard for Wikipedia. One of the requirements I came up with was for the first prominent pseudocode sample in each article to include a link to Wikipedia: Wikicode, which describes some details of the pseudocode, for reference purposes, using the {{wikicode}} template. However, currently this template ( Template: wikicode) contains text referring to Wikipedia. How should this be fixed? Derrick Coetzee 19:08, 4 Oct 2004 (UTC)
Moved from Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)
When I translate an article from a foreign-language Wikipedia (which I do a lot of) I routinely add a note in the references section such as, in the case of Colonel-General "This article draws heavily on the corresponding article in the German-language Wikipedia." In that particular case, the person who originally requested the translation on Wikipedia:Translation into English proceeded to comment out this acknowledgment describing it as "self-reference". I do not think it is self-reference in any disparaging sense, and I suspect it is necessary in order to properly comply with GFDL (and certainly with reasonable scholarly standards of acknowledgement) but perhaps I have misunderstood, so I am bringing the question here. As I see it:
Anyway, I'd be very interested to hear from others on this: on the legal matter, I'd like in particular to hear from someone who better understands the legalities of complying with GFDL, not just someone with an opinion about how they'd like things to be. I'd also like to an explanation of how, if at all, this violates our rules on self-reference. I think it would be absurd if everyone in the world can cite the German-language Wikipedia... except other Wikipedias. -- Jmabel | Talk 22:45, Oct 15, 2004 (UTC)
End moved text
So, here I am. Is there already a standard on this of which I am unaware? If not, would someone like to propose one? -- Jmabel | Talk 20:26, Oct 16, 2004 (UTC)
IMO the following argument is not convincing.
I say they complicate the unattributed use. What's wrong in people knowing that this is Wikipedia's article, not of a random web-snatcher? Mikkalai 23:50, 18 Oct 2004 (UTC)
It's not Wikipedia's article. It's my article (or whoever wrote it) which is being published by Wikipedia, as permitted under the terms of the GFDL. Wikipedia is no different from any "mirror" in this respect, except that Wikipedia is in many cases the initial publisher. — Kate Turner | Talk 02:26, 2004 Oct 21 (UTC)
So, again: I don't believe that main reason of using the "This Wikipedia article..." phrase is problems of use by others. I say, if these "others" disagree that it is a wikipedia article, then let them sweat a bit. Mikkalai 02:58, 21 Oct 2004 (UTC)
"Forking," given above as the basic justification for the ban on self-reference, is a term taken from the computer field. Normally, it refers to reuse of software code. In open-source software, self-reference (for example, to details of particular machines or installations) is a hindrance to legitimate reuse.
Scholarly content differs from software because its value consists of accuracy, not functionality. To help establish accuracy, scholars cite their sources. Any Web site that uses Wikipedia material without saying where it is from (and this practice is pervasive) is engaged in rotten scholarship--in fact, in plagiarism.
It follows that any passage in a Wikipedia article that says it is a Wikipedia article can only be to the good, since it helps reveal bad scholarship on the part of others. If others won't cite the Wikipedia as source, let us in effect do it for them.
In conclusion: the software analogy is a false analogy. Software can be anonymously reused because it is self-verifying--you just check if the program works. Scholarship cannot be anonymously reused, because that breaks the chain of citation on which its quality depends.
Thanks for listening, Opus33 16:50, 23 Oct 2004 (UTC)
This was removed as a self-reference without explanation. Looking at what links here, there are a number of links from the article space to this Wikipedia space page. anthony 警告 21:03, 27 Oct 2004 (UTC)
I added the section "Community and website feature references" to try to explain some of the finer points that people seem to be missing. I hope it is in keeping with the spirit of the policy. Many people think "avoid self-reference" merely means "don't say Wikipedia", which is obviously an oversimplification. I invite any disagreement about this new content. Deco 04:25, 14 Nov 2004 (UTC)
I was recently browsing the category of NPOV disputes and I found it quite funny that the Talk Page for Fascism and Communism was listed on the category (talk pages shouldn't be subject to NPOV, should they? =P). Apparently, the template for NPOV dispute was moved by someone citing Avoid self-references to the talk page. According to this page, yeah, that technically would be correct. But it breaks the automatic generation of the NPOV disputes.
Furthermore, many of these templates are being put on the main articles, not the talk pages. The de-facto policy is to, actually, put the stub mark on the actual article, not the talk page. When people start arguing about whether or not the controversial tag should be put on the talk or the main article page, it's a needless argument (I saw this in Talk:Atheism. In short, this policy about templates is bloated and is near impossible to pull off, because of people's perceptions about these tags.
In that case, perhaps this page causes more problems than it causes when it starts talking about templates. Obviously you shouldn't say "This Wikipedia article discusses" inside an article, but if you consider the templates, I think this policy should be amended. But due to the self-referential nature of most templates, I think the only possible solution is to delete those clauses. Ambush Commander 21:20, Jan 4, 2005 (UTC)
We have Template:In Wikipedia and the more versatile Template:Sr for links from the main namespace to e.g. the Wikipedia namespace. It seems these are acceptable in templates because for mirrors and forks they cause no inconvenience, mirrors and forks can simply blank the template. However, for unclear reasons Netoholic is against such links, with or without this template, see Wikipedia:Templates_for_deletion#Template:Sr and e.g. Mapquest. Any thoughts?-- Patrick 09:43, Feb 2, 2005 (UTC)
What is to be done with PMID (which contains the text: For information on using PMIDs in Wikipedia, see Wikipedia:PMID.)? Removing the offending text entirely seems a bit harsh. — Itai ( f&t) 23:45, 6 Feb 2005 (UTC)
Also, does this apply to Stub (disambiguation)? In other words, just how standard a policy is this - should I remove on sight, no questions asked, or are there any limitations? — Itai ( f&t) 12:44, 7 Feb 2005 (UTC)
I have created template:project usage as an addition to template:selfref, for the specific purpose of usage conventions within Wikipedia. See natural number and billion for examples; there are probably many others where it should be added. Fredrik | talk 15:22, 5 Apr 2005 (UTC)
One of the trigonometry articles contains this:
It says "many fields", and an introductory textbook in any of those fields can be hundreds of pages long, so of course what it says remains true even if that Wikipedia article grows to the equivalent of 100 pages long. Do the reasons for objecting to self-reference in Wikipedia articles apply to the statement above? Someone has objected to this particular self-reference on the article's discussion page. See uses of trigonometry (currently undergoing a bit of an edit war, so maybe this won't be in the current version when you look). Michael Hardy 01:25, 2 May 2005 (UTC)
This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 1 | Archive 2 | Archive 3 | Archive 4 |
So, by self-reference, you mean the word "Wikipedia"? That does seem like a good policy. What about links to Wikipedia subjects? Seems like those would break under forking, too.
Otherwise, this is just commonsense that nobody ever thought of. B-)
-- ESP 05:55 20 Jul 2003 (UTC)
So I assume this policy does not apply to disambiguation and the disambiguation pages boilerplate text?
Also how does it apply to stub boilerplate text? Are they still allowed because eventually the reference to Wikipedia will be removed? -- Popsracer 05:59 20 Jul 2003 (UTC)
So, just because I'm a big booster, I want to give a devil's advocate question. To wit: the stated reason for avoiding self-references is to make it easier to fork Wikipedia. I ask: how important is it to make it _easy_ to fork Wikipedia? The Wikipedia:Wikipedia namespace links, standard boilerplate, etc., makes our work on the project easier. How much pain do we have to go to to make downstream modifiers' lives easier? -- ESP 06:11 20 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Another question: what about the legal disclaimers, like not giving medical advice or legal advice? Do those fall under the boilerplate extension? Lastly, is there a technical solution for marking up "meta" information? For example, editorial comments, disclaimers, stub notices? -- ESP 06:22 20 Jul 2003 (UTC)
And another other question: what about references to the Talk: and User: namespaces? --
ESP 06:22 20 Jul 2003 (UTC)
This is a very misconceived rule IMO. It encourages the duplication of content in multiple articles, when a self-reference would refer people to the appropriate place. In practice, at worst this may mean that for some articles that forkers would have to edit them slightly to make them suitable as standalone pieces. Our first priority should be to build the best encyclopedia we can, and compromising that to make it marginally easier to fork seems a bad tradeoff. -- Robert Merkel 11:39 20 Jul 2003 (UTC)
I should however add that it is not all that common for self-references to be the best way to handle things and that other methods of providing links to other articles are often a better idea. I just don't want to remove them from the quiver for the times when they are necessary. -- Robert Merkel 11:43 20 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Personally, I prefer
it shows were the links lead and identify meta information. Even printed, it's probably understandable.-- User:Docu
Another question is, if we should remove redirects from the article namespace to the Wikipedia/User/talk namespaces or not. Often, they were created when moving articles there. -- User:Docu
Are there exceptions to the rule of "avoid self-references" ? Is the mention of "wikipedia talk" on the VFD disambig page flouting policy ? Jay 18:00, 11 Apr 2004 (UTC)
Actually, I think the VfD page is a good example were the self reference should stay. It is an important term here that needs explanation. Wikipedia would not be any harder to duplicate, if vfd explained that there is a certain on-line encyclopedia were these letters have a special meaning.
In the page Talk:VFD I have written more fully why this one should stay. Sander123 11:06, 10 May 2004 (UTC)
As long as the link is an external link, rather than a link to another namespace, it doesn't violate this policy. If you use a direct link there is a problem with duplication, because many duplicates exclude the Wikipedia namespace. anthony (see warning)
We could also avoid a template name like "In Wikipedia" and call it "In this project"; this is not needed for an uneditable copy (because not visible), but it might be better for a fork.-- Patrick 14:45, 6 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Should redirects from the article namespace be allowed to the Wikipedia/User namespaces? Same question was asked above without any response. Page in question is Wiki Canonization which redirects to Wikipedia:Canonicalization. Jay 21:06, 7 Jul 2004 (UTC)
I noticed that some new users make the mistake of using external links instead of wikilinks (like This instead of This). I made a list of possible such articles at User:Wmahan/Articles with self-references. Some of these might actually be valid external links (e.g. VFD), but any comments or help correcting them would be appreciated. Wmahan . 00:14, 2004 Sep 4 (UTC)
I'm one of the designers of Wikicode, a proposed pseudocode standard for Wikipedia. One of the requirements I came up with was for the first prominent pseudocode sample in each article to include a link to Wikipedia: Wikicode, which describes some details of the pseudocode, for reference purposes, using the {{wikicode}} template. However, currently this template ( Template: wikicode) contains text referring to Wikipedia. How should this be fixed? Derrick Coetzee 19:08, 4 Oct 2004 (UTC)
Moved from Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)
When I translate an article from a foreign-language Wikipedia (which I do a lot of) I routinely add a note in the references section such as, in the case of Colonel-General "This article draws heavily on the corresponding article in the German-language Wikipedia." In that particular case, the person who originally requested the translation on Wikipedia:Translation into English proceeded to comment out this acknowledgment describing it as "self-reference". I do not think it is self-reference in any disparaging sense, and I suspect it is necessary in order to properly comply with GFDL (and certainly with reasonable scholarly standards of acknowledgement) but perhaps I have misunderstood, so I am bringing the question here. As I see it:
Anyway, I'd be very interested to hear from others on this: on the legal matter, I'd like in particular to hear from someone who better understands the legalities of complying with GFDL, not just someone with an opinion about how they'd like things to be. I'd also like to an explanation of how, if at all, this violates our rules on self-reference. I think it would be absurd if everyone in the world can cite the German-language Wikipedia... except other Wikipedias. -- Jmabel | Talk 22:45, Oct 15, 2004 (UTC)
End moved text
So, here I am. Is there already a standard on this of which I am unaware? If not, would someone like to propose one? -- Jmabel | Talk 20:26, Oct 16, 2004 (UTC)
IMO the following argument is not convincing.
I say they complicate the unattributed use. What's wrong in people knowing that this is Wikipedia's article, not of a random web-snatcher? Mikkalai 23:50, 18 Oct 2004 (UTC)
It's not Wikipedia's article. It's my article (or whoever wrote it) which is being published by Wikipedia, as permitted under the terms of the GFDL. Wikipedia is no different from any "mirror" in this respect, except that Wikipedia is in many cases the initial publisher. — Kate Turner | Talk 02:26, 2004 Oct 21 (UTC)
So, again: I don't believe that main reason of using the "This Wikipedia article..." phrase is problems of use by others. I say, if these "others" disagree that it is a wikipedia article, then let them sweat a bit. Mikkalai 02:58, 21 Oct 2004 (UTC)
"Forking," given above as the basic justification for the ban on self-reference, is a term taken from the computer field. Normally, it refers to reuse of software code. In open-source software, self-reference (for example, to details of particular machines or installations) is a hindrance to legitimate reuse.
Scholarly content differs from software because its value consists of accuracy, not functionality. To help establish accuracy, scholars cite their sources. Any Web site that uses Wikipedia material without saying where it is from (and this practice is pervasive) is engaged in rotten scholarship--in fact, in plagiarism.
It follows that any passage in a Wikipedia article that says it is a Wikipedia article can only be to the good, since it helps reveal bad scholarship on the part of others. If others won't cite the Wikipedia as source, let us in effect do it for them.
In conclusion: the software analogy is a false analogy. Software can be anonymously reused because it is self-verifying--you just check if the program works. Scholarship cannot be anonymously reused, because that breaks the chain of citation on which its quality depends.
Thanks for listening, Opus33 16:50, 23 Oct 2004 (UTC)
This was removed as a self-reference without explanation. Looking at what links here, there are a number of links from the article space to this Wikipedia space page. anthony 警告 21:03, 27 Oct 2004 (UTC)
I added the section "Community and website feature references" to try to explain some of the finer points that people seem to be missing. I hope it is in keeping with the spirit of the policy. Many people think "avoid self-reference" merely means "don't say Wikipedia", which is obviously an oversimplification. I invite any disagreement about this new content. Deco 04:25, 14 Nov 2004 (UTC)
I was recently browsing the category of NPOV disputes and I found it quite funny that the Talk Page for Fascism and Communism was listed on the category (talk pages shouldn't be subject to NPOV, should they? =P). Apparently, the template for NPOV dispute was moved by someone citing Avoid self-references to the talk page. According to this page, yeah, that technically would be correct. But it breaks the automatic generation of the NPOV disputes.
Furthermore, many of these templates are being put on the main articles, not the talk pages. The de-facto policy is to, actually, put the stub mark on the actual article, not the talk page. When people start arguing about whether or not the controversial tag should be put on the talk or the main article page, it's a needless argument (I saw this in Talk:Atheism. In short, this policy about templates is bloated and is near impossible to pull off, because of people's perceptions about these tags.
In that case, perhaps this page causes more problems than it causes when it starts talking about templates. Obviously you shouldn't say "This Wikipedia article discusses" inside an article, but if you consider the templates, I think this policy should be amended. But due to the self-referential nature of most templates, I think the only possible solution is to delete those clauses. Ambush Commander 21:20, Jan 4, 2005 (UTC)
We have Template:In Wikipedia and the more versatile Template:Sr for links from the main namespace to e.g. the Wikipedia namespace. It seems these are acceptable in templates because for mirrors and forks they cause no inconvenience, mirrors and forks can simply blank the template. However, for unclear reasons Netoholic is against such links, with or without this template, see Wikipedia:Templates_for_deletion#Template:Sr and e.g. Mapquest. Any thoughts?-- Patrick 09:43, Feb 2, 2005 (UTC)
What is to be done with PMID (which contains the text: For information on using PMIDs in Wikipedia, see Wikipedia:PMID.)? Removing the offending text entirely seems a bit harsh. — Itai ( f&t) 23:45, 6 Feb 2005 (UTC)
Also, does this apply to Stub (disambiguation)? In other words, just how standard a policy is this - should I remove on sight, no questions asked, or are there any limitations? — Itai ( f&t) 12:44, 7 Feb 2005 (UTC)
I have created template:project usage as an addition to template:selfref, for the specific purpose of usage conventions within Wikipedia. See natural number and billion for examples; there are probably many others where it should be added. Fredrik | talk 15:22, 5 Apr 2005 (UTC)
One of the trigonometry articles contains this:
It says "many fields", and an introductory textbook in any of those fields can be hundreds of pages long, so of course what it says remains true even if that Wikipedia article grows to the equivalent of 100 pages long. Do the reasons for objecting to self-reference in Wikipedia articles apply to the statement above? Someone has objected to this particular self-reference on the article's discussion page. See uses of trigonometry (currently undergoing a bit of an edit war, so maybe this won't be in the current version when you look). Michael Hardy 01:25, 2 May 2005 (UTC)