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Village pump (proposals) archive

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a question

I already asked this question at the Dutch wiki, but here I'll go: For historians it is pretty important to have good sources about the opinions of people in the past. Wikipedia is a good project, which shows the interests and points of view of a lot people. Is it a idea to make a offline-copy of the whole wikipedia every year or so? I don't know exactly how much spacy on the harddisc wikipedia needs if we would do it that way, but it would be nice. Of cource we would only need the articles, not the editing software. Does anyone know if such a thing exists? I heard of a copy from 2001, but is there also a more recent copy? Effeietsanders 08:06, 14 Jun 2005 (UTC)

The whole of Wikipedia in English is 905 MiB (text and current versions only). This means that on (say) a DVD-9 you could fit it about 9 times (say, for 9 years). This includes articles, talk pages, user pages, templates, wikipedia pages, etc. The whole of en: is 35.15 GiB (text including all old revisions). This means that it could be fitted onto about 5 DVD-9s, or about 2 DVD-18s (rare) or one 50 GiB Blu-ray disk. r3m0t ^talk 11:53, Jun 14, 2005 (UTC)

I forgot to mention that on a HVD (3.9 TB) one could probably fit all old revisions and current ones, in all projects, across all languages. You may even be able to fit all the images too. r3m0t ^talk 12:02, Jun 14, 2005 (UTC)

thanx a lot! and how could it eventually be downloaded? (I'm not planning to do so right now, but investigating the possibility)Effeietsanders 11:58, 14 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Well, I don't think that Wikimedia will be able to afford that - it may eventually be served out with a BitTorrent-style system, or there may be a grant to mail people discs free (rather like Ubuntu). Alternatively, there could be a program which downloads articles on demand and then saves them on your hard disc. Ask User:Magnus Manske. Also, filtering systems may be able to greatly reduce the amount of articles to distribute through quality control, ommission of minor edits, image compression and selection of articles by notability or topic. In any case, I feel it's unlikely that old revisions will be distributed; they are of interest to very few people. Most people just want to know what we know about pie now. r3m0t ^talk 12:07, Jun 14, 2005 (UTC)

PS If you were a serious historian, you would probably be able to access it in, say, the Library of Congress or some other copyright library, and probably other large libraries too. r3m0t ^talk 12:10, Jun 14, 2005 (UTC)

It would probably be best to include as many revisions as possible: imagine an event against (say) North Korea and the US in one June and you were interested in seeing how the story unfolded and how the overall POV of the North Korea article changed as a result. The media would probably be more useful, but a mere yearly snapshot of the North Korea article would be near-useless. r3m0t ^talk 12:13, Jun 14, 2005 (UTC)

of cource, but the more sources, the more information. We can never know exactly what historians may want to use in the future. Ans of cource I don't want to distribute the wiki, but just place it in the larger libraries like the Royal Dutch Library (for holland large, probably not for you :P). And a lot of information can be taken from the talkpages as well. Well, anyway, we never know... Effeietsanders 12:17, 14 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Effeietsanders, I just wanted to make sure that you know about http://download.wikimedia.org -- that's the place where you can download the contents of various wikimedia projects. kmccoy (talk) 18:41, 16 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Yes I found it out. Thanks to ask. I'm trying to get the Dutch Royal Library as far to take care of the "archive" we will produce, I think they will take care of the nl.wikipedia.org, but I don't know if they want to take care of the othe languages. As soon I know, you'll hear from me.Effeietsanders 21:31, 16 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedia Special:Monitor

It struck me that to speed the discovery of vandalism, pumping out diffs at a high rate on a specific page, thereby getting rid of the Recentchanges middleman, may be a good idea.

It would be similar in structure to Slashdot's Meta Moderation system: a designated page, perhaps Special:Monitor, would pump out X number of recent diffs made within the last Y days, on one single page, for the purpose of fast eyeballing.

This would cut out the "middleman" of Recentchanges for those on janitorial duty; only the refresh button needs to be repeatedly abused in order to view massive amounts of diffs and scan for vandalism at a very fast rate.

The details of the method by which diffs are chosen for display can be left to people with more expertise, but I'll offer up some suggestions:

The number of diffs and timerange to pull from can be
- user customisable, or
- fixed at say, 10 diffs per page, pulled from diffs made within the last 5 days
The choosing of whether a diff displays on Monitor can be
- completely random, or
- completely random, but "viewed" diffs are never viewed again, or
- use a probability system.
  - a more frequently edited/viewed article, the diffs of the article will appear on Monitor more frequently
  - an already viewed diff would have its probability of being chosen for Monitor cut, to say, 1/1000th of the original probability

Only suggestions, I don't know enough about the throughput of changes and the number of janitors on duty at any given time to know which method is more feasible. But I believe a Monitor page would greatly facilitate the speedy discovery of vandalism.

-- Znode 05:40, 2005 Jun 14 (UTC)

Now, there's something for me to consider... r3m0t ^talk 12:07, Jun 14, 2005 (UTC)

Perhaps you could put this in Bugzilla and tell us the bug number here? r3m0t ^talk 12:11, Jun 14, 2005 (UTC)

Some further ideas:

This could begin with IP removal edits with blank summaries and expand.
Buttons on the page can cause the required action to popup in a new window.
This could be done on an external site, RC IRC channel bla bla.

Basically, Znode, a) thanks for your idea and b) I may be way ahead of you. If I will be allowed to make this... muahaha. r3m0t ^talk 13:56, Jun 14, 2005 (UTC)

http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2411

-- Znode 16:52, 2005 Jun 14 (UTC)

Or you could just summarize the diffs and put them right in the edit summary, so they are visible in recent changes without having to visit each one. See Wikipedia:Village_pump_(perennial_proposals)#A_better_description - Omegatron 17:14, Jun 14, 2005 (UTC)

Well, that would help. r3m0t ^talk 06:00, Jun 15, 2005 (UTC)

Perfecting an algorithm to summarise large edits is non-trivial. If it merely chooses the first change, it can also be easily worked around by vandals (make first change valid).

It also does not solve the problem that once it is off the rapid-flowing Recentchanges, it is never to be seen again. Thus if a time period has a higher vandal rate than usual, but that time period does not have enough janitors, the vandalism done at that time cannot be "saved for viewing" at a time period when there are more janitors online and less of a vandal rate.

-- Znode 07:34, 2005 Jun 15 (UTC)

I'm quite a fan of this idea. I think a significant reason that vandalism remains in wikipedia is that someone isn't actively monitoring RC (or not enough people are.) Once an edit has passed from the most recent changes, it's not likely to be picked up again by someone looking for vandalism, so then it sits until someone sees the article, notices the vandalism, and cares enough to fix it. This idea, if well implemented, could serve as a check to that problem. kmccoy (talk) 06:36, 15 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Oh, another idea would be giving anonymous edits and accounts created in the last X days a higher probability. Don't know if the database load of the latter makes it feasible. -- Znode 07:35, 2005 Jun 15 (UTC)

Last update? When?

Can we add a function to display a "Last update: 6 months ago" message on an article's header if that article hasn't been edited for a while, say, over 6 months. If I see such a message, I'll be more skeptical with the information.

This is not a good solution. Sometimes people edit a page to fix a typo or adjust layout. A page with outdated information may have been edited multiple times without the needed update (for example: the current U.S. president: Richard Nixon). -- Toytoy 18:03, Jun 13, 2005 (UTC)

At the bottom of the page (at least, in the stylesheet I use) it says "This page was last modified 18:03, 13 Jun 2005". A more prominent notice, for example in a large font just below the article's title, would just put unnecessary emphasis on something that correlates only weakly with quality. Eugene van der Pijll 18:39, 13 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Edit summaries

I think more needs to be done to encourage users to use this feature, especially on controversial articles. Far too few people make proper and regular use of it. I propose that edit summaries be made compulsory for articles with neutrality/POV disputes (possibly through the mediawiki software?). How might I propose this to become official policy? Its only a guideline at the moment. (Wikipedia:Edit summary) Deus Ex 15:31, 13 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I think this was proposed earlier and opposed for a reason I forget. Howabout1 Talk to me! 16:21, Jun 13, 2005 (UTC)

Edit summaries should be required via software, period. However, as Howabout1 also says, I think this has been brought up before, so you may want to search for old discussions. Thue | talk 17:09, 13 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Software can't recognize pages with POV disputes at the moment (and I don't see any way it can do so, reliably), so this would have to be the rule for all pages. However, sometimes I don't want and need to take the effort to enter a summary; for example, for making very small changes (spelling, links, etc.) I'll check the "minor edit" box. If an edit summary is required for all edits, I'll just type some "asdfafdsfa" nonsense, to satisfy the software. So you're just making it more difficult for me to make small changes, so I won't correct as many spelling errors. And you make it more difficult for new users. I think this easily outweighs the possible small positive effects. Eugene van der Pijll 18:36, 13 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Well, the way I imagined it would be that the software would detect all articles in a POV disputes category, or something like that. I wouldn't suggest that an edit summary should be required for minor edits, as you say that would be pointless. But for articles in factual/POV disputes for major edits forcing people to enter summaries would be desirable. If they just entered nonsense in the summary for major edits, it would show that user negatively, and hopefully they wouldn't be taken seriously for the rest of the POV dispute, as they are not evidently not interested in constructive editing. Deus Ex 22:40, 13 Jun 2005 (UTC)

See: Wikipedia:Village_pump_(perennial_proposals)#Always_fill_the_summary_field. Bobblewik (talk) 23:14, 13 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I can't see that it should be that big a problem to just write fx "sp" when making a spelling correction. Thue | talk 17:31, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)

hierarchies

i often thought of a certain thing but didn't know what it is called. like what the various parts of a barrel are called, what parts usually constitute a castle and stuff like that. these things are often tedious to find out and it would be nice if this would be addressed in a more systematical way in wikipedia.

like a standard box of links kinda like:

harddrives usually consist of

 platter
 read write head
 ...

harddrives are a common part of

 computers
 mp3 players 
 whatever

harddrives are commonly associated with:

  (dunno ... think  castles - knights, siege, ...)

somehow like that. most of this information is of course already there but like i said ... it would benefit from a more systematical approach.

anyway ... just felt the need to post this. not much of a wikipedia expert ... dunno if something like this was already discussed/dismissed or something. not even sure if this is the correct place to post this. Sorry if it isnt.

please comment

Not encyclopedic; this would have to be part of a different Wiki project. —Sean κ. + 18:59, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)

hmm ... i don't really intend to start a discussion about it ... just wanted to suggest it ... nonetheless: i'm not sure what you mean with "not encyclopedic" here. given that the information is often already included in the articles (only harder to access) and the whole thing not being all that different from categories - really don't see it as much of a step. --Qnnq 00:24, 13 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I think that it would be great to have projects such as this, but Wikipedia adheres to the belief that an encyclopedia is a collection of essays, not facts. It sounds like what you are suggesting can't be put into essay form, so it can't go on Wikipedia.

Exceptions are the infoboxes popular on some pages, and the many list articles. However, the list articles generally are only used in the context of another article, and infoboxes are used to summarize the information in an essay. I don't really think this idea fits either of those categories. —Sean κ. + 00:38, 13 Jun 2005 (UTC)

essays, not facts ... hmm yeah it's a hard fit then. perhaps i should check with wiktionary. thanks for the comments --Qnnq 05:02, 13 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Many series of articles have "navigational templates" at the bottom of the page to help readers find logically related articles (look here). Succession boxes are used for many political offices so that readers can easily see who held the office before and after. Categories ties together articles in a hierarchical fashion. There are many existing methods to allow readers to find the articles on staves and bung holes (or rather, to allow editors to help readers find the articles). Also - "essays" is not the best word, as it implies an expression of an opinion. The word "articles" best captures what we try to create. (Yes, there are many lists, but if that was all we had Wikipedia would be a very dry reference). Cheers, -Willmcw 06:28, Jun 13, 2005 (UTC)

Splitting article RfCs by topic

On the RfAr/RFC page, Maurreen suggested splitting the article RfCs into the main Wikipedia catergories, Culture, Geography, History, Life, Mathematics, Science, Society, and Technology. Could be a way of getting more responses, by breaking down the list into more digestable sized chunks, and allowing people with specific interests to pick up on items which may be of interest. Thoughts here please! Dan100 07:43, Jun 12, 2005 (UTC)

This might also have the benefit of encouraging people to write RFCs about topics rather than people. I'm begininng to suspect that few of us are big enough to react well to being the named target of an RFC. Bovlb 04:35, 2005 Jun 13 (UTC)

Wiki content from the internet

Hi,

There are lots of owners of (e.g. University-based) websites who would be happy for the research content (projects/articles) of their websites to be copied onto Wikipedia pages. Could Wikipedia come up with a logo which website owners could put at the bottom of their websites which says something like "feel free to copy the contents of this article which I have written and use it (word-for-word or otherwise) as the basis of a Wikipedia article without copyright restrictions"? A wiki page with external links to all of these websites would also be required (or an easy way of searching for the logo in Google). It's a lot less effort for a busy postdoc researcher to stick a logo on all his/her articles than it is to wikify all the articles and put them onto wikipedia. If the material was worth copying, then I'm sure there will be plenty of Wikipedians to do it!

Rnt20 18:51, 11 Jun 2005 (UTC)

That is very simple. They have two options. One is to say "I release this under the GFDL", the licence on which Wikipedia is based. Then everyone who uses it, including Wikipedia, can use and modify their text, as long as the original authors are credited. The other option is to place it into the public domain, which gives up those crediting rights. They cannot give Wikipedia-specific permission. Well they can, but we can't use it. smoddy 18:57, 11 Jun 2005 (UTC)

It would be nice to have an eye-catching logo, which other scientists could spot on websites, and copy onto their own websites. Most scientists have a duty (both morally and sometimes in funding contracts) to support the public understanding of science. I, for one, would be happy to email such a logo to people in several Universities. It needs to look professional (and I'm not much of a graphic designer, I'm afraid). Preferably it would mention GDFL and Wikipedia (with a link) as Wikipedia has goals which most scientists would agree with (wheras GDFL is a little obscure). (PS obviously this would be equally useful for humanities researchers -- please excuse my personal biases!). Rnt20 19:29, 11 Jun 2005 (UTC)

You can't really seperate the GFDL and Wikipedia, as our content is licensed under the GFDL and anyone wanting to contribute their work to Wikipedia would have to do the same. GFDL might be obscure but anyone wanting to contribute their hard work to Wikipedia needs to understand what it entails. If you create a useful website and allow Wikipedia to use its content, you're also allowing anyone who wants to to mirror the site for profit by stuffing it full of popup pr0n ads to do so as well. It would be a little misleading to suggest to people that they are giving Wikipedia permission to reproduce their work without making them aware that anyone else can do the same. — Trilobite (Talk) 20:41, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I decided to act myself, and have created a Wiki page which is designed to help website owners at the following location:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Adding_a_GFDL_license_to_your_webpage

I have also added the following footer (or something similar) to some of my webpages:

<TABLE><TR><TD VALIGN=CENTER><IMG SRC="http://www.strw.leidenuniv.nl/~nevec/outreach/gfdl.png"></TD><TD VALIGN=CENTER><B>GFDLcontent</B>. The work on this page, and in the project subsections linked to by this page are covered by a <A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Free_Documentation_License">GFDL</A> license, and the author states that the text and images can be copied within the restrictions of this license (e.g. the material can be copied into free encyclopedias such as <A HREF="www.wikipedia.org">Wikipedia</A>). Please <A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Adding_a_GFDL_license_to_your_webpage">add a footer</a> like this to your own webpages to promote free access to knowledge.</TD></TR></TABLE>

See e.g. http://www.geocities.com/robert_tubbs/page1.html

The non-word GFDLcontent is included so that Google searches can find this footer.

Please tell me (urgently!) whether there are any problems with this. Otherwise I will try to get the same footer added to lots of University webpages at several different Universities. Rnt20 10:19, 16 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Wouldn't it make more sense to use http://www.wikicities.com/skins/common/images/gnu-fdl.png this image since it's more of a standard representation of the GFDL, and one which is included by default in MediaWiki installations? Angela . 02:17, Jun 20, 2005 (UTC)

editors indexing section and member only editing

NO MEMBER ONLY EDITING!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I think that there should be a place that stubs and arcticles that need serious editing are temporally moved to. What do you think?

I strongly disagree with members only editing. what if someone browzing the Wiki notices something wrong or something he could add. He probably wouldn't take the time to become a member to make just a few changes. (Left by anon 141.156.241.63)

The vast majority of us strongly disagree with members only editing as well
There are multiple ways for articles that need editing to gain attention. There are various templates, categories, and the article improvement drive. —Sean κ. + 18:48, 11 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I agree. Some of the most important contributions (sometimes the most annoying for people who have worked hard on a page!) come from experts (e.g University researchers) who come across factual inaccuracies or misunderstandings and put in their own corrections. These people are rarely Wiki members, and rarely follow wiki style guidelines, but are essential for keeping Wikipedia factually accurate (and it is up to the rest of us to wikify what they contribute). Rnt20 19:25, 11 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I would like to see a preferences option for members that would display some statistics about who edited the currently viewed page. I.e. whether the page was created by a member; edited by a non-member; number of edits; last edit, &c. That way a random page viewer might get some quick clues without going to the history page. — RJH 02:15, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Wikihow & Wikipedia

Wired Magazine has an article, "Wiki Targets How-To Buffs" on WikiHow, a website dedicated to "how-to" information. Wikipedia does not have a clear policy on whether how-to information belongs in Wikipedia:

Furthmore there is a separate How-tos bookshelf at Wikibooks. As a matter of practicality, there should only be a single global wiki on a given area to maximize the community size needed to ensure the success of the community. IMHO how-to info belongs in Wikipedia and we should subsume Wikihow content. If Wikipedia does not want that information, we should VfD all our "how-to"s to move that information to WikiHow to aid in their success (and maybe encourage them to move into WikiCities, but that's a separate discussion.) What do others think? Samw 03:07, 11 Jun 2005 (UTC)

We can't just take content from WikiHow since it isn't copyleft (although they were considering that at one point - see their http://wiki.ehow.com/Copyrights copyrights page). I don't think the existence of that wiki should affect whether or not How-tos are kept on Wikipedia. Angela .

Auto generated APA/MLA refereces

I suggested generating a properly formatted reference for each article so that students would save time and credit Wikipedia more. Auto citations have become a standard part of any online reference. Britannica, the Oxford DNB, etc. all leave a proper reference at the bottom of articles. Months before when I first asked if Wikipedia could also incorporate this feature, someone thought it could be accomplished after permalinks for every version were implemmented. Now that permalinks are a part of Wikipedia - would adding the reference feature to the toolbox be easily accomplished?

lots of issues | leave me a message 2 July 2005 14:03 (UTC)

How about this:

<div>
To cite this article, you can use the following:
"{{PAGENAME}}". ''Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia''.
Revision dated {{REVISIONTIME}} (UTC), {{REVISIONDAY}} {{REVISIONMONTH}} {{REVISIONYEAR}}.
Accessed {{CURRENTDAY}} {{CURRENTMONTHNAME}} {{CURRENTYEAR}}.
Available from <http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?{{PAGENAMEE}}&oldid={{REVISIONID}}>.
</div>

Obviously the "REVISION" variables other than REVISIONID which already exists would need creating...

We could put it in MediaWiki:Footer or whatever it's called.

How would those variables be created? lots of issues | leave me a message 2 July 2005 17:36 (UTC)

James F. (talk) 2 July 2005 14:49 (UTC)

Please do, it would avoid a long list of repeat questions and a lot of annoyance of newbie or one-time users who have no clue how to cite. - Mgm|^(talk) July 2, 2005 15:13 (UTC)

Does that link format work if the article gets renamed later? - Fredrik | talk 3 July 2005 23:21 (UTC)

No, it doesn't, but if you add the curid it does. --cesarb 3 July 2005 23:29 (UTC)

See feature request 800 at bugzilla. — Catherine\^talk 5 July 2005 05:18 (UTC)

Cite wikipeda

Take a look at the bottom of this encarta article. On the bottom of every page they tell people how they can cite that encarta article. Wouldn't it be nice if we did that also? We could add a template to the bottom of every page giving MLA style or, even better, we could make a special page which would output a whole bunch of different citing styles. We always have lots of people asking how to cite us and I bet there are people who don't want to cite wikipedia because of the diffuclty. This link is Broken 18:36, 25 Jun 2005 (UTC)

We've got the link to Wikipedia:Citing Wikipedia on top of both the help desk and the reference desk and yet people fail to notice. I doubt putting info on the bottom of an article would help much. Still, I used greasemonkey to put a link "How to cite Wikipedia" on the very bottom of my own wikipedia pages between "About Wikipedia" amd "Disclaimers". There's too many ways to cite to put them all at the bottom of an article, but maybe we should spread that link globally so they don't have to read help pages to find it. - Mgm|^(talk) 21:13, Jun 25, 2005 (UTC)
Good idea. Put a citation at the bottom of each page, automatically generated for each page/version; it's only an extra line. Agree a default style (eg APA), and put a link to Wikipedia:Citing Wikipedia for more info. Eventually, let users specify a preference for the citation style. Thought: for now, it may be worth putting it manually on, say, featured articles, as the very last thing on the page (if a non-ugly way to do it can be found).Rd232 28 June 2005 21:17 (UTC)
- Secondary thought: this proposal is in a similar spirit to my suggestion to put a short summary of helpful links on the top of every Talk page. Don't make people look for things, put them right where they'll find them without trying. It's one of the reasons (recommendations right where you can't miss them, without being intrusive) that Amazon became so successful.Rd232 28 June 2005 21:20 (UTC)
Could we put a "cite this page" link at the bottom of every page (or a "cite" tab at the top), and then have a special page (as for ISBNs) that shows how to cite that version of that page using various citation schemes? This addition might stealthily improve Wikipedia's standing in academia, and encourage other users to cite us. Bovlb 2005-07-06 00:55:05 (UTC)

See bug #800. Bovlb 2005-07-06 01:31:29 (UTC)

bring section labeling back!

A while ago, section headings like ==section==, ===section===, etc, had numbered labelings (ie: 2 section; 3 another section; 3.1 subsection, etc). However, it seems to be removed. I personally think that it was useful, and I'm sure some other contributors feel the same way. Maybe there should be an option to control this in the Preferences menu? --Ixfd64 2005 July 1 20:22 (UTC)

Take a look at Preferences-Misc-Auto number headings.-gadfium 2 July 2005 00:32 (UTC)

Thanks a lot! :) --Ixfd64 2005 July 2 02:24 (UTC)

Link audio icon

I think the Image:Sound-icon.png in the header should be linked to Category:Spoken articles. - Roy Boy ⁸⁰⁰ 1 July 2005 15:57 (UTC)

That's not possible, unless the image is not hosted in the Image: namespace. For example the editing toolbar buttons, they are in the /skins-1.5/common/images/ directory rather than the namespace. As far as I know you can't link an Image: image to anything other than its description page. Master Thief Garrett^Talk 2 July 2005 01:08 (UTC)

You could redirect the image page to the article destination. But please don't -- it's very disconcerting. smoddy 2 July 2005 20:11 (UTC)

Public Library Portal

This is really two ideas I came up with after noticing one of those copyright notices (saying you can only copy 5%) in one of my local libraries.

Firstly a portal for people accessing Wikipedia through public libraries, the idea being that public libraries will link to the portal from their start up pages.
A wikipedia/ wikimedia poster that libraries can print of and use, explaining what Wikipedia is and explaining the copyright status of wikipedia articles.

Let me know what you think here or on my discussion page. If this is in the wrong place, please can someone move it to the correct place. Thanks, John Cross 1 July 2005 13:53 (UTC)

I like the idea of creating a Wikipedia (or Wikimedia) poster for use in libraries. We could prepare it as a Wiki page (e.g. Wikipedia:Library poster, and then convert it to PDF. I'm not sure that a new portal is appropriate. Perhaps you should raise this at Wikipedia:WikiProject Librarians. Bovlb 2005-07-01 18:52:45 (UTC)

Historically, librarians have expressed a...distaste for Wikipedia. -- Cyrius|✎ 2 July 2005 16:20 (UTC)

RSS feeds from category galleries / Spoken Wikipedia Podcast

I've noticed Category:Spoken articles has a gallery of recently submitted media at the bottom. I've implemented a program that scrapes the wikipedia's html and generates an RSS feed with the ogg/vorbis spoken articles as enclosures, but shouldn't wikipedia be able to do this automatically?

The experimental feed is at http://dingoskidneys.com/~dholth/spokenwikipedia.xml and the program to generate it minus any recent local revisions is at http://dingoskidneys.com/~dholth/spokenwikipedia.py .

The feed includes 75 ogg vorbis files and instructs a podcatcher like bashpodder to download 450 megabytes of spoken wikipedia. I would like guidelines on what total enclosure size might be considered reasonable and what might be considered harmful before attempting to give a spoken wikipedia podcast a greater audience.

Also, as a student of current spoken wikipedia intent on producing new ones, I would like a RSS with every of approx. 110 spoken wikipedia articles enclosed, for convenient study of the existing works.

DanielHolth 1 July 2005 05:45 (UTC)

"Books on tape"

My wife and I often listen to books on tape. There's a lack of free content out there. If I were to record myself reading a public-domain book, and release it into the public domain, it would be a large file, even in ogg format. Would Wikimedia be willing to host it? Where would be an appropriate place for it? Commons? Wikisource? Thanks, – Quadell ^{(talk) (sleuth)} 18:36, Jun 24, 2005 (UTC)

Please also see Wikipedia:WikiProject Spoken Wikipedia. I was planning to upload some readings of PD poems to Wikimedia, which seems like the appropriate place for such things. Cheers, -Willmcw 18:47, Jun 24, 2005 (UTC)

I'd say wikisource is the right place to put recordings of PD books and poems. You could put a template with a link to the file right at the start of the page. - Mgm|^(talk) 19:27, Jun 24, 2005 (UTC)
I'd put it on commons and link to it on source. Even though it will be the wrong language for other wikipedia's they might want the original english version (assuming it was originally english and the translations aren't always in PD yet) (have they split the wikisources yet?). This link is Broken 18:36, 25 Jun 2005 (UTC)
See also http://audiobooksforfree.com , project gutenberg http://www.gutenberg.org , and Wikipedia:WikiProject_Spoken_Wikipedia. audiobooksforfree has an astonishing amount of excellent free-as-in-beer spoken content. project gutenberg has higher quality audiobooksforfree material for example the complete Sherlock Holmes. This website: Literal Systems http://verkaro.com/audio/ has been producing some very good free-as-in-speech speech. One of gutenberg or literal systems would probably be happy to host your audio and people specifically looking for audio books would be more likely to find it. DanielHolth 1 July 2005 15:13 (UTC)

Uploading of images

I just went through the history of front page articles and someone (user Lolwtf) uploaded a horrible picture, then he/she (from what I know) used an ip address (64.26.109.9) to reuse that image on two occasions on two articles. I was wondering is it much work to allow only people who have contributed a certain number of articles (10 maybe) to be allowed to upload an image. I was also wondering why was the image not removed immediately? It is still there!! If not delete it at least replace it with something - blank dot maybe. I looked some more and the image was on the page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Images_and_media_for_deletion for deletion. Going through the bureaucratic procedure of wikipedia the image will still be there for a week.

Lolwtf (talk · contribs) and 64.26.109.9 (talk · contribs) and Wikipedia:Images and media for deletion. Do you mean Image:3QTFUN-4.jpg? Well, it was deleted. r3m0t ^talk June 29, 2005 21:23 (UTC)

Special Page

Could an Admin place the following tag in this Special Page? {{CategoryTOC}}. The page is Special:Listusers. It would make it easier to browes, in my opinion. Thanks. --Admiral Roo June 29, 2005 19:47 (UTC)

I do not think it's possible (special pages are not editable, and the messages shown at the top are shared with other lists). --cesarb 29 June 2005 20:18 (UTC)

Overhaul this page

My proposal is to change the format of Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals) as follows: There would be only three sections to this page:

Instructions on how to post a proposal and how the approval process works.
Links to active proposals, with each proposal posted on its own page. Each proposal would have its own talk page as well.
Links to inactive proposals and the decisions that were reached.

Here's a mock up.

Advantages

The page won't get so long.
It will be easy to see the results of discussions, and what steps are being taken.
Discussions will take place on separate pages. This will make it much easier to follow the discussions you participate in or choose to watch.
Easier to archive discussions.

Disadvantages

A little more difficult to start a proposal.

Please discuss on talk page.

-- Samuel Wantman 29 June 2005 05:56 (UTC)

make user filtering easier in Special:Listusers

It would be nice if Special:Listusers was made easier for filtering. The list for users and admins has been merged for this new version of MediaWiki. For example, I can select so that only admins are listed, but when I click "next 500", etc, it shows regular users again. I know that I can add "&limit=500" to the original URL, but not everyone knows that trick... :o --Ixfd64 2005 June 29 02:56 (UTC)

File an enhancement "bug" request in Bugzilla. -- Cyrius|✎ 29 June 2005 12:27 (UTC)

Page history last and first

Wikipedia recently upgraded to a new wiki software version, but there is a feature that I had hoped would be in it.

Whenever you click on the history tab, there are several numbers at the bottom - 10, 20, 50, 100, 500, etc. that gives you the "results per page" feature. However, I really want a "last" and "first" feature - that is - I can hop right to the beginning of a page's history to see how it began as an article. That way, I don't have to press the "next 500" button over and over again to see the article's beginning.

Hope this will be in the next version of the wiki software. — Stevey7788 (talk) 28 June 2005 20:18 (UTC)

Bug Reports

Could an authorized admin create a link to bug reports for all of mediawiki's navigation links page? Thanks. --Admiral Roo June 28, 2005 14:53 (UTC)

What? r3m0t ^talk June 29, 2005 21:19 (UTC)

Ok, you see the Wikipedia logo, below that the Navigation box, which has the links to the Main page, Community Portal, Current events, etc.? I think an error report link should be included in that box in Wikipedia and all other Wikimedia projects. That way if someone sees a bug, they don't have to hunt down the special page that links to where you can report the bug. --Admiral Roo June 30, 2005 19:36 (UTC)

Junior Wikipedia proposal

This is a suggestion that might be related to the perennial proposal, "Filter or Site for Young Students" but offering an alternative solution to filtering for concerned parents. It would also bring certain other advantages.

I propose an off-shoot/fork of the the EN wikipedia, targeted for children. I envision articles with a reading level of, say, 12 years (hopefully without becoming patronising!). Emphasis would be on articles with an obvious attraction to children. Articles covering objectionable material could/would be avoided without impacting the main wikipedia. Articles on complex topics (e.g. the high-level mathematics articles) could be provided at a much more appropriate level.

Has this proposal been offered before? Is there any interest in such a "en-junior" for children? Would anyone else be prepared to help on such a project? Stewart Adcock 28 June 2005 11:22 (UTC)

It already exists :) The Simple English wikipedia. R adiant _>|< June 28, 2005 12:36 (UTC)

My intended emphasis is on focused content, not simplified language. Stewart Adcock 28 June 2005 14:25 (UTC)

m:Wikijunior? -- Cyrius|✎ 28 June 2005 19:03 (UTC)

Actually, Wikijunior is what gave me the initial idea. That's a series of books though, not an encyclopedia. Stewart Adcock 28 June 2005 19:57 (UTC)

The "books" are really just mini-encyclopedias. The Wikijunior people are interested in exactly the sort of project you're talking about. Target your audience. -- Cyrius|✎ 29 June 2005 12:26 (UTC)

Watchlist removal shortcut

I'd like to suggest the addition of a shortcut to remove items from a person's watchlist.

Currently, the "My watchlist" page boasts the usual list of latest updates such as

(diff) (hist) . . Wikipedia:Copyright problems; 04:22 . . Username (Talk | block) (→ June 27)

Would it be too difficult to make it instead show this?

(diff) (hist) (unwatch). . Wikipedia:Copyright problems; 04:22 . . Username (Talk | block) (→ June 27)

It would save having to farf between a couple of pages when trying to change a watchlist. Grutness...wha? 04:57, 27 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Have you tried displaying the entire list? (There's an option for it on the watchlist) It has checkboxes to remove individual items. R adiant _>|< June 28, 2005 12:37 (UTC)

Yes, but I just thought it might be useful if a watched page pops up near the top of your watchlist that you no longer want to watch, to just be able to remove it straight from the top page. (hmmm...did that parse OK?). BTW, I've clicked on "Mark pages visited", but nothing's appearing in bold. Does the "last visit" function not work properly, or am I doing something wrong? Grutness...wha? 28 June 2005 13:52 (UTC)

I also would like this option. Rd232 28 June 2005 21:23 (UTC)

Hit-counter of non-users to a page

So that the editors can see how many people are coming to pages they frequent? Non-users part is optional, but I'd like to actually see how many people are going to the George W. Bush page or any other ones that I'm working on. Doesn't have to be complex webtrends statistics, just a simple number since a certain date. --kizzle 00:55, Jun 27, 2005 (UTC)

Even that is hard to do. When a page is only being read by a non-logged in user, the request doesn't even hit the servers most of the time; there is a layer of Squid proxies which serves more than half of the hits. Beyond that layer, the page is cached on memcached on the Apache servers; if the data isn't there, it's read from the slave database servers, which are read-only. Writing even a small counter would be a big performance hit. --cesarb 01:05, 27 Jun 2005 (UTC)

If it didn't have to be accurate, could there be an estimator within a 100 or so just based upon Apache logs? --kizzle 01:28, Jun 27, 2005 (UTC)

We used to have a counter of the number of times a page had been read. It was turned off, apparently in October 2004, because it made a significant hit on server performance. You can see statistics up to that point at [1]. You can click on the month, then about half way down the resulting page, at the bottom of the table of top 50 URLs, you'll see a link to "All URLS". That's about 40 MB as I recall, so you probably want to save it to disk rather than open it in your browser.-gadfium 02:18, 27 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I agree, it would be an unwarranted usage of resources. Maybe if wikipedia had lots of resources left over it'd be fine, but that isn't the current situation. gren 02:23, 27 Jun 2005 (UTC)

It would be largely worthless anyway, because there are so many copies of Wikipedia articles on other websites. For every hit an article gets on Wikipedia, mirrored articles get who knows how many hits. So even if we counted the hits here it would be no indication of how many people are actually reading stuff that was written for a particular Wikipedia article. Grutness...wha? 28 June 2005 13:57 (UTC)

Special color for admin/steward usernames

Would it be a good idea to have administrator usernames have a different color? This feature would help people catch admin impersonators quickly (as opposed to having to go to Special:Listadmins). --Ixfd64 05:15, 2005 Jun 26 (UTC)

No. It's harder to tell administrators from normal users on purpose, because administrators shouldn't be treated differently from normal users just because they are administrators. --cesarb 13:12, 26 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I hate color tags. If you colorize admins, the impersonators would also colorize their names. However, it's a good idea to ban all color tags. -- Toytoy 13:19, Jun 26, 2005 (UTC)

I agree that admins shouldn't have special colours, etc. — but what do you have against colour in general? (I only ask because I want to know.) Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 13:25, 26 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I just don't like colorful pages. To me, colors are reserved for vital tasks such as warning and visualization. I don't want to see a page full of unuseful colors. -- Toytoy 18:06, Jun 26, 2005 (UTC)

Colour is an accessibility issue. Colours and contrast values chosen by the fully sighted with modern screen technology can make access more difficult for those those without full vision and possibly limited to cheap/old technology. Bobblewik (talk)

maps

It would be fantastic if every place name and every historic place name had a map.

We think so too! --Golbez 03:41, Jun 24, 2005 (UTC)

It would be a great thing to have, but the problem is how to make such maps. Hopefully one day we'll have a "WikiAtlas" project so you can just cross-link to a fully-explorable world map with the view centered on that location, but until then it's up to each article author to arrange one. Master Thief Garrett^Talk 03:50, 24 Jun 2005 (UTC)

There are several academic historical maps of China. For example, the 8-volume tome The Historical Atlas of China (中国历史地图集) published during the 1980s in China contains hundreds highly detailed maps for about each province of each major dynasty. Another two-volume work also named Historical Atlas of China (中國歷史地圖) published somewhat earlier in Taiwan, also contains dozens of highly detailed maps. Trust me, it is an exteremely difficult work. It'll take countless trained personnels years of efforts to duplicate the feat on a global scale. And the end result will still contain countless gaps and unanswered questions. I love this idea. It's just way beyond our abilities. -- Toytoy 13:34, Jun 26, 2005 (UTC)

How about a link to Google maps or similar? With the satellite images and Google Earth it would give a decent overview. Problems: Would the URLs stay consistent? How would you choose one map provider (eg Microsoft are going to do a similar service)? Is there a single coordinate system that could be used across them all?

Births and deaths in year articles

I'd like to propose that the list of births and deaths in year articles should be restricted to figures of major international repute. If we listed everyone with a Wikipedia article in these categories, the year articles would be dominated by them (e.g. 1944 would contain over 800 births). If people wish to spin off the articles for, say, Births in 1944 article, then fine (although this should have more detail than just the Category of course). Average Earthman 22:50, 23 Jun 2005 (UTC)

How long would 1944 be with all those? If under 32k, I don't have much of a problem with it. Even if over 32k, I dunno, what other content would 1944 have? It's supposed to list what happened that year. And I dislike this "international importance" bit. A prime minister of a small African country may not be internationally important, but he should go there. Likewise should a pop star, who has no relevance whatsoever :) --Golbez 22:58, Jun 23, 2005 (UTC)

Actual news events? The birth of someone who will go on to appear in TV movies is pretty irrelevent, and most people going to the year articles won't be looking for this. Full lists of people who were born in that year are better served either by the category or by a separate article - e.g. we have a separate Deaths in 2004 article rather than include the whole list on the 2004 article. I've broadband, and it just took nearly five seconds to load the Deaths in 2004 article. So, for an earlier year, a full births and deaths list is potentially wasting up to ten seconds of time for the majority of people who would go to the year to look at the news events. Personally, I'd like a summary of the most famous/influential people who died, such as Ronald Reagan and Marlon Brando in 2004 (we're able to summarise other news events after all, why not deaths?). Average Earthman 22:00, 24 Jun 2005 (UTC)

How long would 1944 be with all those? Golbez, Golbez, Golbez... you should know better than to leave a straight-line like that lying around. 366 days - it was a leap year. Grutness...wha? 28 June 2005 14:03 (UTC)

Page history: Display size of page

To help users evaluate page histories, display the size of a page version in the history, or possibly the change in page size (in % and/or kb) caused by each edit. This would make it easier to spot major changes worth looking at in more detail. Rd232 22:59, 22 Jun 2005 (UTC)

That's an interesting idea; do you (or anyone else) have any idea how difficult it would be, or what extra drain on servers it would constitute? Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 13:28, 26 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Well, its served up by the IRC of recent changes (the change in size), so generating it is clearly not a difficulty. I doubt keeping it would be a large server resource – it would never be more than about 10 bytes, about the same length as the user identifier. Maybe a feature request? smoddy 14:11, 26 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Sockpuppet check via hashing

Cross-posted to Wikipedia talk:Sock puppet

How about revising the WikiMedia software so that along with each edit, a hashed version of the editor's IP address would be listed in the edit history? That way, it would be possible to determine if two users have the same IP address, without actually giving away their IP address. Joo-joo eyeball 15:23, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)

It's already possible, although only 2 people are able to use the IP checker. r3m0t ^talk 15:44, Jun 21, 2005 (UTC)

Sounds like a good idea in principle. However, it might be prone to abuse: someone looking to find a user's IP address could iterate through the space of all IP addresses finding those that match the hash. The IPv4 space isn't so prohibitively large as you might expect. My workstation (a 2GHz Xeon) can compute ten million MD5-Base64 hashes in 43 seconds in Perl, while still doing other things at the same time. At that rate, it would only take about 18500 seconds (5.1 hours) to test the entire 4 billion possible IP addresses. --FOo 15:58, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Without commenting on the idea itself, you can prevent this attack by concataneting some (constant) secret bytes to each IP address before hashing it. jdb ❋ (talk) 18:23, 26 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Sockpuppets aren't illegal. I don't like this idea. An IP checker that only two people can view sounds ideal to me for cases of banned users returning under different names, etc. - Omegatron 16:39, Jun 21, 2005 (UTC)

Another issue is that "two accounts posting from same IP address" and "sock puppet" are not interchangeable, and must not be confused in Wikipedia policy or practice.

Example one: I and another Wikipedia editor post from the same IP address ... for good reason; we live together and share the same ISP connection! It would be a mistake to interpret this condition as the two of us being the same person. (Our writing styles are completely different, and we work on different sorts of articles, so perhaps it wouldn't be an issue usually -- but if we both happened to vote on the same VfD, it would be erroneous to discount one of our votes because we happened to be on the same IP address.)

Example two: Many systemic Wikipedia abusers have used open proxies to do their evil deeds. To conflate "same IP address" and "sock puppet" would hand these abusers an argument in their own defense: "Since we're not posting from the same IP address, we are therefore not sock puppets. Wikipedia practice even says so!"

Making more information about users' IP addresses, for the purpose of finding out sock puppets, will tend to lead to people conflating "same IP address" with "sock puppet". This is a bad mistake and should not be contributed to. --FOo 23:29, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)

See also Wikipedia:Sockpuppet/Proposal - most people seem to support checking for sockpuppet accounts of disruptive and blocked users, which is basically where the problem lies. Good faith multiple accounts need no checking. R adiant _>|< 08:09, Jun 22, 2005 (UTC)

In "Upload file" page, change "licence" to "license"

In the special page Upload file, which is apparently protected from editing by guys like me, there are two instances where "license" is spelled "licence". Everywhere else on the upload page, the word is spelled "license". I propose that those instances where the word is spelled "licence" be changed to "license" for consistency with the rest of the page. H Padleckas 01:09, 17 Jun 2005 (UTC)

The first addition of the word uses the "licence" spelling" [2]. The original uses American spelling ("dialog") but doesn't use that word [3] - Omegatron 01:35, Jun 17, 2005 (UTC)

Or we could just change "license" and all other misspellings to make everything consistent and correct. — Chameleon 21:38, 23 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I too find bad spelling irritating, but have learned to see the multicultural spelling on wikipedia as a good thing. lets face it, none of the minor differences between British english & American english are exactly a threat to comprehension. I far prefer to see that a page has been contributed to by speakers of both standards (remember that British english is most the common form for 'english as a foreign language' speakers from the EU) than to watch another form of U.S. hegemony spread to this international pool of knowledge. - DavidP 01:06, 26 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Articals

I for one am sick to death of seeing "artical" in wikipedia, mostly on discussion pages, but still, these people sound like morons. It's article.

Is there anything that can be done about this? Perhaps a subst:template for user pages? An awareness campaign? Or would it be easier to just contact the people at Oxford and get them to change the spelling of the word?

--Robojames 15:41, 15 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Go to User:Humanbot, a bot-assisted spelling project, and add it there. smoddy 15:52, 15 Jun 2005 (UTC)

That's already been done; see Wikipedia:List of common misspellings. Also, comments may not be edited, even for misspellings or typos. r3m0t ^talk 16:16, Jun 15, 2005 (UTC)

I guess I'm not proposing that we edit comments, merely that we educate people that this is incorrect and if you use the word artical to describe your edits, you might not be taken seriously. --Robojames 18:47, 15 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Whhhhhh. Good luck. If you succeed with teaching people about article, try to get them to learn the difference between its and it's... and not to put apostrophes in decades like "the 1970's"... and that people start their surnames with capital letters. There are tons of these "language nasties" around out there... Grutness...wha? 28 June 2005 14:07 (UTC)

No one actually spells it "artical" it's more of a typo than anything. Everyone knows the difference between it's and its but when you are typing quickly you make these mistakes. If they only/mainly occur on talk pages then why should we fix them? This link is Broken 28 June 2005 14:29 (UTC)

Automated conversion of an existing article's citations to a footnote system

This was cross-posted to Wikipedia talk:Footnotes.

If someone wants to do a lot of people a big wiki-favor, please create a macro for automated conversion of an existing article's citations to a footnote system. For instance, Convention on Psychotropic Substances needs to be converted to footnotes, but that would be rather time-consuming to do manually. There are probably hundreds or thousands of articles in need of such conversion. Please take a look and see what you think. Thanks! Remember me 14:35, 15 Jun 2005 (UTC)

That particular article is fixed now. Remember me 03:16, 16 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Images in other wikis

Hi! I'm from Ukrainian wikipedia. Recently I have translated article about Gavrilo Princip. I need to put images in my article, and there are some in English article. But images in English article is not images from WikiCommons. How about to create a special tag, like [[Image:en:Example]] or something like that, which would put images in my article from articles from other Wikipedias? It will be easier for me and for servers. 13.06.05 Please contact me

I would also like to know how to make Wiki-crosslinks for images too. Also, is there an easy way to move an image from one of the individual Wikis to WikiCommons where all Wikimedias can have access to it? In the long run, I think it is a better idea than uploading redundant images. H Padleckas 01:34, 17 Jun 2005 (UTC)

There's no simple way to link to images in other Wikipedias, but the process of transferring is not so hard.

To move to another Wikipedia:
- First, of course, check the image's description page to be sure you understand the copyright license. Many pop-culture images in the English Wikipedia (screen shots, album covers, movie posters, etc.) are used under the United States fair use concept, and may or may not be usable in other jurisdictions.
- If you believe it's usable in your Wikipedia, just right-click the picture and save it to your hard drive -- you might want to change the name to a more descriptive one in your local language.
- Upload the picture to your local Wikipedia.
- On the local image description page, make a link to the English image description page, and copy any licensing or source information from the English page to your local page.

To move to Wikicommons, it's the same process:
- Check licensing -- it can only be uploaded to Commons if it is GFDL or public domain.
- Right-click and save from local wiki to hard drive.
- Rename file (on your hard drive) to be more specific or internationally understandable if necessary.
- Upload to Commons, following instructions there.
- Tag image on local wiki with {{NowCommons}} and list on Images for deletion (or the equivalent image deletion procedure on non-English Wikipedias).

Image syntax should not need to be changed unless the filename has changed -- [[Image:Foo.jpg]] will look first for a file named "Foo.jpg" on the local wiki; if it finds one, it will use the local one, if not, it will look at Commons and use that one. — Catherine\^talk 21:05, 18 Jun 2005 (UTC)

You could create the following template in the Hungarian wiki: "Template:CrossWikiImage".

Then when you wanted to reference the page, you could use the following template:

{{
CrossWikiImage|en|Gavrilloprincip.jpg
}}

It's not a perfect solution, but it might be a reasonable workaround until the software supports cross language images. And because it would be implemented as a template, it would be easy to change if/when the software changes.--Arcadian 22:58, 24 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Good idea...

You know how in user preferences you can set your date to display a certain way if an article has the date within parenthesis (or something like that)? I hit upon an idea. How about putting unstandard spellings of words within parenthesis and then they would display according to the setting you indicate in your user preferences? If you speak American english then someone who wrote in British english would put nonstandard words in parens and then that word would render in american english. Did I explain myself well?? Jaberwocky6669 02:58, Jun 13, 2005 (UTC)

That has been proposed in the past, and rejected on grounds I can't remember at the moment. -- Cyrius|✎ 08:44, 13 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Was it maybe a developing problem?Howabout1 Talk to me! 14:56, Jun 13, 2005 (UTC)

Nonstandard? It's probably a POV problem about which spellings should be () and which should not. Also, it would be confusing for new editors, difficult to maintain (what, every instance of "colour" to be converted?) and it is not really needed. r3m0t ^talk 17:33, Jun 13, 2005 (UTC)

It would make editing much harder if so many words had to be marked up in this way. See my mailing list post about this, with an example showing how complicated the markup could get. Angela .

Ah, I get it now. Originially I thought that British spellings could simply be bracketed [[]], but as I was about to explain it I realize that doing it that way would only convert British spellings to American but not American to British! Thanks for showing me the light. Jaberwocky6669 June 29, 2005 16:23 (UTC)

Am I allowed to?

First, have I put this question in the right place? If not, can someone please tell me where it should go?

I have this idea for a brilliant long distance walk. I would like to tell

How about a Wikiatlas?!?

How about a Wikiatlas? It can collect various maps, historical maps, etc.

Did you not see the heading immediately above? -- Cyrius|✎ 19:28, 13 July 2005 (UTC)

W3C validation links

Has the inclusion of W3C validation buttons been considered before? It would be a small (88x31) image link, which fits perfectly at the bottom of the page with the Wikimedia and MediaWiki logos. Wikipedia is confirmed valid XHTML by W3C's tool, though we're just short of compliant with their CSS validator. Phoenix-forgotten 01:25, 2005 July 12 (UTC)

Featured article dating

Hydnjo made an interesting point on the help desk. At the moment, there's no simple way for a reader (as opposed to a Wikipedian) to tell how long ago an article became featured. That matters to some extent, because there is some chance that the article has gone downhill since featuring. Obviously that's the exception not the rule, but if we're honest we'll admit to ourselves that it could happen especially for more controversial articles.

He proposed that we change the featured template to show when the article became featured, not just the fact that it is. I like the idea also. Any thoughts? Isomorphic 04:52, 11 July 2005 (UTC)

I can't see any harm in it. Isomorphic or somebody, please come up with a prototype implementation (or just be bold and do it.) JesseW 07:05, 11 July 2005 (UTC)

I think it's a good idea (especially as there's a common complaint on the internet that wikievolution often works in reverse, that is, the better an article is, the more likely it is to head downhill...). — Asbestos | Talk 16:24, 12 July 2005 (UTC)

The easiest thing to do would be to add a {{{1}}} to the template, so you'd type {{Featured|June 11, 2005}}. Downside is that ones you haven't defined yet will then all read "{{{1}}}" so maybe make a new template and phase the old one out or... something... Garrett^Talk 23:03, 13 July 2005 (UTC)

Rating System for users

Has the idea of creating a (possibly automated) rating system ever been floated? Sort of like eBay, the system could track how many times a user gets reverted. A rating system would track the number of edits to reverts the user has. When a 'mischevious' user makes an edit, it is flagged under Recent Changes as suspect.

You might want to look at Wikipedia:Trust network. -- Jmabel | Talk 05:43, July 10, 2005 (UTC)
As far as number of reversions: for one thing, it's relatively hard to identify an edit as a reversion unless it is done immediately following, and by an admin using the rollback button. For another, other than vandals this may be more a matter of whether a person works in controversial areas than of how good their edits are. -- Jmabel | Talk 05:43, July 10, 2005 (UTC)
The problem I see is tagging reversions as being "bad". Say I revert an edit that fills an article with "Bill Gates u r gay faggot!!!11!!"--should I be "punished" for fixing it? Not that it matters to me, but some might misunderstand the system and see their "good vs. bad" rating as something to be proud of. And, as with registration dates and # of edits (both of which are hidden) a rating system could make editors who make little or no vandalism repairs appear to be "better" than others, which isn't the wiki way. Certainly it'd be cute to have something like GameRankings' trust system (Adam Smith is trusted by ## users") but that would also potentially make popular editors seem to be superior. Garrett^Talk 13:10, 10 July 2005 (UTC)
- You seem to have misunderstood the suggestion: it is the revertee (the editor being reverted) who would be flagged as 'mischevious' (sic), not the reverter. HTH HAND —Phil | Talk 13:04, July 12, 2005 (UTC)
  - Ahhhh I see now! Still I think many here would balk at the idea of any sort of system that would make some appear "better" than others. After all we've already got admin "anonymity" so I'm not sure they'd like this idea. But it's a good plan and could be useful if implemented correctly. Garrett^Talk 23:07, 13 July 2005 (UTC)

Each version of an image includes his copyright

Each image version should have its own copyright tag in order to avoid someone to change it when he updates the image (or intentionally). --Zimbricchio 23:26, 9 July 2005 (UTC)

Reference taskforce?

One of the most important issues of wikipedia is that its work contains little reference. Could wikipedia form a referencing taskforce, like what wikipedia has done with the cleanup taskforce?Elixir of Life July 7, 2005 11:12 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:WikiProject Fact and Reference Check. — Catherine\^talk 20:23, 10 July 2005 (UTC)

User talk inputbox

This form uses the inputbox extension to place a {{test}} message on a user talk page.

The advantage is that the {{test}} message is editable, like it had been placed there with subst before the page is saved, making it easier to customize.

Links to related templates will appear above the edit box. These can be changed at Template:Test intro.

Enter the user name (with the User_talk: prefix) in the box below, and click "create article" to add a test message to that user's talk page.

You can access the same page using a URL like [4] (replacing 'Testingggg' with an actual user name). It will only work for users that have no talk page yet. Angela . July 6, 2005 02:07 (UTC)

There now works even if the talk page already exists. Angela . 15:03, July 14, 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedia Bully

I would like to propose a new page called Wikipedia:Bully which would clearly define behavior which, while not vandalism, is unacceptable for Wikipedia. There is a fine line on this site between people offering comments and people simply attacking other users and articles. In particular, the following items would make someone a wikipedia bully

Creating disturbances on Featured Article Candidate pages, i.e. objecting just to object
Calling users names or referring to articles that the user has worked on in a derogatory manner
Posting rumors or lies about other wikipedia users, such as accusations of vandalism which arent true
Leaving hostile messages on a users talk page, or attacking a user for items discussed with a third party on their talk page.

Those are just a few examples. The main difference between a Wikipedia Bully and a Vandal would be that the bully doesnt actually mess around with the articles, only attacks and bashes people who work on articles that they dont see as worthy to be on Wikipedia. Just an idea at this stage. What do folks think? -Husnock 5 July 2005 09:09 (UTC)

Some of the behavior you describe is in Wikipedia:Troll. Calling users names is considered a personal attack.The problem however isn't defining them, it is dealing with them...--Fenice 5 July 2005 09:15 (UTC)

I opened up the project page for discussion. I feel it needs defined policy. -Husnock 6 July 2005 04:49 (UTC)

It's not clear to me what the purpose of this page would be. Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 6 July 2005 09:29 (UTC)

What is needed is a way to get rid of them and block them permanently, not just more rules or a "shame board" (which will end up being just a list of meaningless nicknames and numbers). And that should include abusive admins, and control-freaks who keep reverting legitimate revisions/additions to "their" articles. 12.73.201.125 6 July 2005 20:03 (UTC)

The pourpose of the page is explained there. I have set up a vote, but we need more people to come to it. Go to Wikipedia:Disruptive user. Howabout1 ^{Talk to me!} July 7, 2005 23:34 (UTC)

When and how did Corporations get rights of individuals

Hello All:

I am making a first post to Wikipedia.

The basic question I have concerns how the rights of corporations have changed since 1789. It is my understanding that corporations had charter rights of limited duration previous to a supreme court decision, I believe in a footnote changing the status to full individual rights of a citizen.

where would one go to find written commentary on this issue.

Go to wikipedia:reference desk and ask it there. Howabout1 ^{Talk to me!} July 4, 2005 16:05 (UTC)

Swap of tool positions on edit page

When you edit a page, underneath the edit window you get all the templates used on the page, then the special charatcer insert box. All fine and dandy, unless you're working on a page like Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Criteria, Wikipedia:Templates for deletion, or one of the Wikipedia:Templates type lists, on which there may be 50 or more templates. Adding special characters from the insert box can be a real chore then, scrolling up and down to find the items you want. Is there any way of swapping the order these things appear, so that the list of templates is after the special character box? Grutness...wha? 4 July 2005 12:48 (UTC)

Yes, that could be a good feature for the Preferences. In the meantime just open another edit window and copy-n-paste the character(s) you want. Master Thief Garrett^Talk 5 July 2005 09:26 (UTC)

WebRing links?

This isn't on the "perennials" page; I don't know if it has been looked at. Please see my questions on Talk:Webring about whether a WP can be linked into a Webring. Robin Patterson 4 July 2005 03:38 (UTC)

What would be the point? We aren't searching for traffic. We have enough as it is. r3m0t ^talk 13:32, July 17, 2005 (UTC)

Music WikiProject touring history idea...looking for comments

Would it be beyond the scope of the Wikipedia for musicians to have a tour history section, wherein tour histories can be compiled with setlists, links to audio of the concert (legal ones like etree.org, of course...), etc? I know that many fansites of bands and artists try to compile this information, but perhaps it would be much better to do this here?

Would this be a WikiProject idea or more of an idea requiring an independent Wiki? I could easily see this becoming fairly complex and leading to cross-references with other musicians (guest appearances), database searches, recording sources, etc. --Girolamo Savonarola July 4, 2005 03:05 (UTC)

Please, no. This kind of bulk data doesn't really fit encyclopedia style. -- Cyrius|✎ 4 July 2005 08:46 (UTC)

Try http://www.rollingstone.com instead -- each band has a calendar for entering tour histories. — Catherine\^talk 5 July 2005 05:24 (UTC)

Dead external links

This feels like an idea that someone mentions every so often but which cannot be implemented for whatever reason. If this is the case then feel free to delete this post (which I guess you should anyway); but I'd greatly appreciate having a message dropped into my Talk Page.

Anyway, here's my idea. I was just looking at an article that featured a link to eBay. The link didn't work, because the sale had closed. It wasn't in any way important that I could access the link, except in a kind of "how cool is that, it really _did_ get sold on eBay!" kind of way. But I suppose one could make the point that references such as this one serve as a reference.

This is the second time this has happened to me with eBay links in the last week or so. eBay takes down listings for sold items quite quickly, I think.

Would it not be possible in situations such as these (websites such as BBC.co.uk keep an excellent archive, but I'm sure there are other examples where archived but nonetheless useful data is not available) to, for example, take a screencap of the page, or using HTTPTrack to download the site, and then publish it in some sense through Wikipedia. I guess there might be copyright infringments with this, and my knowledge of US Copyright law is not strong enough for me to know whether this is "fair use" or not.

Just an idea... --James Kemp 4 July 2005 00:10 (UTC)

ooops, no-one even responded to this, so *I* will! Well, that's a good idea, but the problem is the legality of us hosting the information. Beyond linking to the Internet Archive's backups, I really don't know that we can go making copies of something without nasty problems, or at least having to set up a complex legality reasoning page like the Archive has.

The easiest option would be to create a screenshot compilation (say 800x1600) of what the entire page showed and host it off of WP itself. That way the questionable fair use of such a capture would be in the hands of the provider. Or... something... one current idea for Wikiversity is that linked-to sites be archived by WV itself, so I guess when they get their proposal ironed out we could mimic it. Master Thief Garrett^Talk 5 July 2005 21:39 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Introduction

I believe that this page should be permanantely protected. For many users it is the second page they see at Wikipedia, and it is too often and too easily vandalised. Tests should be redirected to the sandbox, where they belong. Many editors are put off, I believe, by seeing vandalism and trolling on there when they go to find out about Wikipedia. With protection, new users can get a full introduction un-interrupted. Hedley 3 July 2005 23:14 (UTC)

I have reverted that page dozens of times - it's a lightening rod for vandalism, which I have used to wikipedia's advantage. Vandals introduce themselves at that page, which draws my attention to their entire portfolio of work. lots of issues | leave me a message 4 July 2005 02:02 (UTC)

Wikis

Ok, here is my idea. A collaborative music score. I know this doesn't belong in Wikipedia, but if it were worth it to do this, where could it go? Jaberwocky6669 04:27, Jun 27, 2005 (UTC)

Please expand... It sounds like an intersting posibility - I assume you could put it on wikicities:Main Page. If you do do it - please let me know on my Talk page. JesseW 2 July 2005 06:49 (UTC)

I'm not sure you need a whole wiki for a music score. You could trial this on the Scratchpad wiki, but using a wiki that has Wikitext Music installed would be better. Angela . July 7, 2005 07:37 (UTC)

Changing "Random page" to "Random article"

Would it be a bad idea to change "Random page" to "Random article" for accuracy? See my post on MediaWiki talk:Randompage. --Ixfd64 18:44, 2005 Jun 26 (UTC)

Makes sense to me. — Chameleon 2 July 2005 11:38 (UTC)

This now seems to have been done. Modular 22:51, July 9, 2005 (UTC)

Breakup controversial articles

I suggest that we breakup some controversial articles if possible. We can keep the core concept in the original article and make it as short as possible, and place details in many sub-articles. If a part is protected because of a debate, it will not affect other parts. -- Toytoy 14:07, Jun 26, 2005 (UTC)

What's to stop someone from just pushing their controversial material into one of the unprotected parts? -- Jmabel | Talk July 2, 2005 04:22 (UTC)

While short versions of many long articles would be useful, it's important to avoid creating situations where the controversy is pushed off into a special article of its own. All articles should, as much as possible, treat their subjects comprehensively, including the good and bad together. -Willmcw July 2, 2005 04:28 (UTC)

I also think they should break up articles. That way they don't block the whole content. Take a look at section the section #Split the George W. Bush article to diversify the location of content below on this same page. 2004-12-29T22:45Z 20:25, July 9, 2005 (UTC)

Where has the archive gone?

I can't see the archive. Has it disappeared? Bobblewik (talk) 13:02, 26 Jun 2005 (UTC)

No, its just empty! smoddy 18:11, 26 Jun 2005 (UTC)

So what happened to http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28proposals%29&diff=prev&oldid=14852204 ?

There was a proposal titled Create date object method' independent of link method. Can anyone point out to me where it went? Bobblewik (talk) 30 June 2005 19:10 (UTC)

Er - the link above gives the discussion on the proposal, I think. The archive policy is simply that things will be moved to an archive page, where they will be kept for a minimum of 7 days, then will be removed, and still accessable from history, on both the Village Pump section page and the corosponding archive. Do you have any other questions? JesseW 2 July 2005 06:45 (UTC)

Thanks for the response. I could not understand why the archive was empty. From what you say, this could occur if there was nothing was posted between 14 and 7 days from the current date.

I would like to know whether anything more will happen after Tim Starling said There's no need for special syntax, the software can recognise dates in plain text.. Bobblewik (talk) 2 July 2005 15:37 (UTC)

Look through the history (if you look through the history on the archive page, rather than the main page, that will make it easier to see the final status of discussions) - if you think more should be disscussed on that topic, feel free to post a new discussion on it on the Pump. (You're welcome, BTW) JesseW 21:10, 9 July 2005 (UTC)

make all-caps URLs work

I personally like to manually type www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article to get to a certain article, which conveniently gets redirected to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article automatically. However, this does not work when typed with caps lock on (e.g. WWW.WIKIPEDIA.ORG/WIKI/ARTICLE does not work). This can be fixed as follows:

 - make /WIKI/ redirect to /wiki/
 - make /ARTICLE redirect to /Article if ARTICLE does not exist but Article does.

Why in the world would you ever turn caps lock on? :-) - Omegatron 18:59, July 24, 2005 (UTC)

My Eyes!!!!!!

Dear...to whomever this may concern,

This place is just the best thing the collective human mind could have come up with. It is a pure and (seemingly) free expression of knowledge. There is only one small issue that i am amazed has not been dealt with yet: colours. Black on white background is horrendously bad for the eyes. When i read articles, i always have to select the text, which then makes it white on dark-blue. Why is there not a button to change the CSS to a more pleasing colour? I would suggest white text on dark-blue.

Otherwise: perfect.

Try changing the settings on your browser if you hate it so much - it's the standard for hundreds of websites. (I may post instructions soon.) r3m0t ^talk 13:28, July 24, 2005 (UTC)

If you make a user account, you can modify the CSS settings for yourself. Cheers, [[smoddy]] 13:30, 24 July 2005 (UTC)

To get an idea of what can be achieved, see the Gallery of user styles — yes you can have flourecent green text on black if you still miss those old phosphor monitors. For guidance on how to do it, see m:User_styles. -- Solipsist 14:11, 24 July 2005 (UTC)

Wikiproject Echo

WikiProject Echo is looking for participants to integrate information from other-language Wikipedias into the English one. The scope is to find articles present in another Wikipedia but not this one, and echo and translate them here. Some language skills recommended. R adiant _>|< 13:25, July 23, 2005 (UTC)

List of famous slogans

Since we have a List of commercials anyways, why not a List of famous slogans?

Antonio Hardpartyliner Martin

Like List of slogans, List of advertising slogans, or List of catch phrases....?

Catherine "Been there, done that" Munro :)

Perhaps because "famous" is rather difficult to pin down, and usually very geographically (and temporally) restricted. --Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 09:35, 24 July 2005 (UTC)

Preclinical medicine/medical science project

Hi all, I am PhatRita, a medical student. I have been following the pages in human anatomy and physiology and indeed a lot of medical subjects such as embryology. The pages there are a mess. Human anatomy faces problems with terminology (eg whether to use lay or professional. Other problems include that with redirection, eg arm represents the whole of the upper limb which would be wrong in anatomical terms. There are problems which involves the interlinking of human anatomy and animal anatomy which results in complex and sometimes unreadable pages. The other problem would be the lack of application of this anatomy to clinical topics, for example the wrist and carpal tunnel syndrome. A lot of articles are stubs, and others which are not are one senteced and therefore should be. In human physiology, the entry is a stub. It was under COTW consideration and got phased out due to lack of votes to keep it in running.

I am proposing a preclinical medicine project which resembles that of the Clinical Medicine talk page, with focus on preclinical topics like anatomy and physiology. The topic will provide the following main points:

Clear distinction between human and animal pages
A clear and concise point of reference for medical students or anyone who may be confused about something in a textbook or lecture
expansion to fill all the gaps in human anatomy
include good relevant clinical information to link everything together
make the organisation and structure clear. clean out redirection problems

please mail me with suggestions or interest

PhatRita 11:43, 22 July 2005 (UTC)

While being a complete anatomical reference is an admirable goal, remember that your audience is everyone, not just medical students and other experts. Experts writing for experts tends to leave articles unreadable by everyone else. -- Cyrius|✎ 21:23, 22 July 2005 (UTC)

This is true. However, the state of the medical pages right now are unacceptable. The general pages regarding anatomy such as the thorax or head and neck are in suffiecient detail for general users. The detailed pages, for something obscure, eg a muscle, is a higher level of knowledge. This higher knowledge must be written in anatomical terminology to be accurate and valid. Anyone who wishes to reach a professional level of knowledge in a subject must learn the terminology (which is not a lot - there is a page dedicated to that). This is that higher level of knowledge.

Also peer reviewing by lay uers would help to alleviate that problem. PhatRita 12:51, 25 July 2005 (UTC)

It sounds like a great idea -- I'd make some proposals at Clinical Medicine (if you haven't already), decide by consensus the best name for your project, and create a new page following the format of other WikiProjects. Work on it yourself and publicize it where you can. Good luck! — Catherine\^talk 02:24, 23 July 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for your approval. I proposed the idea on the Clinical Medicine talk page and have received a good reply. I think this peer reviewing and organisational structure would be used by the Collaborations idea suggested by User:Knowledge Seeker below would be a good trial for this project. If anyone is interested in helping out drop me a line:here

PhatRita 13:00, 25 July 2005 (UTC)

Well I eventually did set up the Wikipedia: WikiProject Preclinical Medicine page after some positive feedbacl at the Clinical medicine project page. If you are interested in helping, whether a lay or professional user, please feel free to come along and help. Like Cyrius says, it is for everyone and lay users would make a great peer reviewing audience to ensure that it is readable by all. PhatRita 23:54, 26 July 2005 (UTC)

Hives Save Lives - Africa

With all the emphasis on poverty and hunger relief in Africa, we have a rather unique approach to attacking this problem. We do not give money, we give practical assistance. Please look at www.hivessavelives.com. We would welcome cooperation with you and perhaps linking to your website.

Our Project Director, Linda Whitby, can be contacted on +44 01273 302586 or by e-mail to [email protected]. She would be delighted to hear from you.

Best regards.

Richard Unwin Founder Hives Save Lives – Africa

Dear Richard,

Welcome to Wikipedia. If you can explain your proposal, it would enable discussion.

Regards,

lots of issues | leave me a message 04:28, 22 July 2005 (UTC)

Please tell more about your project.... right here! The smell of it, suggests a number of approaches seen that are quite a bit more appealing than simple money donation. EWB, the water project here in wikipedia, wiki craftsmanship mentoring, and a plethora of other empowerment tactics. Please tell more, eyes are reading. Are you familiar with our Embassy project here in DC? Introductions of NGO operations and collaborative efforts at the grass root. Your quick blurb here should be expanded, so please do. TTLightningRod 15:41, 25 July 2005 (UTC)

Seperate the Watchlist into sections

Just like the Watchlist edit page. This would make the Watchlist much easier to.. watch. Also, talk pages should have their own section. --pile0nades^{talk | contribs} 04:38, 21 July 2005 (UTC)

Sandbox namespace

There used to be a link to the Sandbox on the Main Page, but it got removed (possibly due to the fact that the Sandbox was getting used too much and new users were getting confusing edit conflicts). Therefore, I propose that there be multiple Sandboxes, all in a sandbox namespace (such as sandbox: or test:). The current Sandbox page would show a listing of all existing sandboxes, and possibly an inputbox to quickly create a new sandbox.

Advantages:

More sandboxes available
Less edit conflicts
Easier to find and maintain (just search for all pages in the Sandbox namespace) and Admins can immediately delete test pages that have not been used for a while without going through the deletion process
Can put a link to the Sandbox index on the Main Page without causing a sandbox overload
The "sandbox games" (such as Sandbox/Hangman and Sandbox/Chess) would have their own place in the "virtual playground"

And since there will be more than one, we could give the sandbox namespace a more extendible name (such as "Playground").

DrZoidberg 15:19, 20 July 2005 (UTC)

The impression I was given is that the recommended thing to do is create your own "personal" sandbox as a subpage of your user page. There's been some effort lately to recommend these instead of the single "global" sandbox. See this suggestion and its discussion. Steve Summit 03:23, 22 July 2005 (UTC)

There are already several. Look at the template. Howabout1 ^{Talk to me!} 18:08, July 20, 2005 (UTC)

So why not put all the sandboxes in a namespace? Then anyone who wants to make a new sandbox can simply create one that starts with sandbox:, and they could all easily be found by searching for pages that start with sandbox:. Plus, playing with page moves and redirects will not be a problem!! DrZoidberg 19:12, 20 July 2005 (UTC)

I think it's fine as it is. Howabout1 ^{Talk to me!} 19:31, July 20, 2005 (UTC)

I agree, it is "fine" as it is. But it could be better! DrZoidberg 19:39, 20 July 2005 (UTC)

A name space is more than simply shoving "String:" in front of the article title. -- Cyrius|✎ 20:06, 20 July 2005 (UTC)

I know, it has to be programmed in or something along those lines. Besides, if it was that easy, I would have done it myself by now :-) DrZoidberg 20:09, 20 July 2005 (UTC)

I like this proposal. It makes a lot of sense, and it wouldnt be too hard to implement. I don't really know why making a namespace is more then shoving sandbox: in front of something though. :( --Phroziac (talk) 01:19, 21 July 2005 (UTC)
- I believe a namespace is searchable (ie. when you do the advanced search thingy you can pick which namespace you want to search). So it would allow admins to easily find and/or monitor the sandboxes. But if shoving sandbox: in front of the title is all we need, then I'll be bold and do it myself :-) DrZoidberg 01:59, 21 July 2005 (UTC)

Another possibility would be to have a link in the Sandbox header which points at [[User:~~~/Sandbox]], where the current user's name is inserted. I don't see a current variable which allows doing that. (SEWilco 06:17, 23 July 2005 (UTC))

Could we set it up that each user gets their own sandbox, but no-one else can see it? That way you don't have to worry about being embarrassed by somebody seeing what you're working on. Also, I'd love to have a personal sandbox so I can be working on something, save it, and still find it there when I get back. (Of course, people who keep a large amount of stuff in their sandbox for a long time may have to be warned by a moderator to clean it out.) Ravenswood 15:15, July 25, 2005 (UTC)
- Anonymous users would get sandboxes, too (e.g., 136.182.5.238/sandbox), but they would be automatically deleted every (week/day/hour/whatever). Ravenswood 15:15, July 25, 2005 (UTC)

Point-Counterpoint

Arguments for and against drug prohibition is the greatest page in Wikipedia! By that I mean, both sides get to state their case, AND both sides get to respond to their opposition, AND nobody is getting into an edit war (as far as I can tell). In my opinion, EVERY controversial topic should have a page like this. With, of course, a category or listing which points to all of them. -- Ravenswood 22:05, 19 July 2005 (UTC)

I just looked over the drug prohibition page again, and I've got some ideas.

The category can be Category: Point Counterpoint
The drug page is divided into six categories:

Arguments for
Arguments against
Point-Counterpoint for
Point-Counterpoint against
See also
References and external links

Can the first two sections be eliminated? Or are they necessary to provide an overview before getting into the discussion?

The drug page is actually about drug prohibition, so the "for" arguments are actually against drugs and vice-versa, which is confusing. However, people know what you mean when you say "drug prohibition", but just saying "drugs" might refer to legal drugs. So I don't know if there's a way around that.
I've gotten off-topic. I'm supposed to be talking about Point-counterpoint pages in general. So, we could easily come up with a list of topics and create stubs for them:

Point-counterpoint...

...abortion
...the War in Iraq
...homosexuality

...etc etc etc. Given the incendiary nature of these topics, they should fill-up quickly.

The limits of the 'tree' structure make it sometimes difficult to tell which statement is being arguend against. Using numbers instead of bullets may alleviate this -- but also might make it more confusing.
Unlike other Wiki pages, which strive to be non-POV, P-CP pages are very much POV, but each POV is represented. A boilerplate text to that effect will be attached to the top of each article in this category.

I'll add more as I think of things... -- Ravenswood 22:24, 19 July 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedia Mainstream Science seems to lack a comfortable place for critiques and investigations that might raise questions in opposition to thermonuclear/gravity dominance. (seems to be a very touchy subject) TTLightningRod 23:00, 19 July 2005 (UTC)

What? -- Ravenswood 23:59, July 19, 2005 (UTC)

Please forgive this seemingly odd interjection to your list. But if you are working on, or have found unique ways to elevate edit waring on contentious topics, I for one will be most interested in such efforts. Although at first glance, one might not think that "scientists" would engage in the politicized or emotional type debates found around the first three items to your list. But oh my goodness, the fire stakes and dipping oil are scary close at hand to the "mainstream", should anyone point out that even Einstein might have been wrong. TTLightningRod 00:56, 20 July 2005 (UTC)

See the page I reference. It seems to be relatively free of edit wars, for the simple reason that both sides get their own 'turf' on the same page.

Typical Wiki page:
(original): Marijuana is dangerous and should be illegal.
(edit): Marijuana is harmless and should be legal.
(edit:) Marijuana is dangerous and should be illegal.
(etc)

Point-Counterpoint page:
(original):

Marijuana is dangerous and should be illegal.

(edit):

Marijuana is dangerous and should be illegal.

Actually, studies show that it's relatively harmless. (cites source)

Unlike a typical Wiki page, there is no reason for a user to edit the page to re-state that Marijuana is dangerous. It's already there, in black and white. If they do any editing, it will be only to beef up the statement which is already there:

(edit):

Marijuana is dangerous and should be illegal. (cites several sources)

Actually, studies show that it's relatively harmless. (cites source)

And at this point, both sides agree to let the reader decide which is the better argument. The absolute worst-case scenario is that the argument gets repeated one time in the opposing section:

Marijuana is harmless and should be legal. (cites sources)

Actually, studies show that it's dangerous. (cites sources)

Edit wars shouldn't happen because each side should only be editing "their" paragraphs. An edit to an enemy paragraph designed to weaken the argument can be fixed as easily as any other vandalism. -- Ravenswood 01:59, July 20, 2005 (UTC)

This proposal is important. No, not the first time it's been brought up, and I'm still a bit short on faith that the community is mature enough yet to adopt such a thing, but the need for this isn't going away anytime soon. Please consider Ravenswood's proposal for the balance, fairness, efficiency, and speed with which NPOV collections can be brought together by using formats such as this. TTLightningRod

The idea is theoretically good as a generic guideline, but I don't think we should push towards making a policy out of "thy shalt not edit thy enemies' paragraphs" -- that might encourage turning articles into discussion pages: and endless exchange of opinions, sources and arguments, instead of the desired outcome, a well-written, NPOV article. --Gutza 19:34, 22 July 2005 (UTC)

Agreed. No need to push for a new policy. This approach however, may work best in the talk-page anyway. Formating main-space, one of the components for good NPOV, can percolate best from structured talk pages. Structured in the sense of clearer devisions between the two sides to every hot item, or three sides, or four... From that, Article space would naturally benefit. Many templates have been introduced and adapted to Article pages, to the great improvement of this encyclopedia. Couldn't talk pages benefit from a similar approach? TTLightningRod

Gutza, I'm not proposing that we change existing pages, or policy. I'm proposing additional pages which follow different rules than standard pages. As you can see, the prohibition of drugs page still exists, and the Arguments for and against drug prohibition page exists as a seperate entity, following different rules. I would not suggest applying the Point-Counterpoint rules to the prohibition of drugs page, or any other 'article' page.... TTLightningRod, I was proposing these pages to be main pages, not talk pages. But you're right, many talk pages would benefit from this type of structure. I would propose that a small number of controversial articles should have P-CP pages, but a large number of them should have a P-CP section in their Talk page. -- Ravenswood 15:06, July 25, 2005 (UTC)

Trivia

Ok, I'm reasonably certain this must have been proposed before, but since I found no reference on it, I thought I might as well be bold and propose it. How about a trivia format for "side-track" information within the articles themselves? Here's a cute example:

The term used for a conational of mine is "Romanian". The word "Romanian" comes from "Rumân" (see Romanian). "Rumân" comes from Romanian serf. Serf comes from Latin servus (slave, servant). Magyars in Transylvania (which, for the very few of you who don't know is part of Romania) use the greeting "Servus!" on a daily basis, as a very gentle greeting ("I am greeting you as an inferior"). "Servus" as a greeting has been "imported" back into the "Kingdom", as we call it (the old Vallachia), in a certain measure, but most of us don't know this entire history. So, essentially, whenever we greet each other this way, we call ourselves by our citizenship. Imagine an Australian meeting another Australian with the greeting "Australian!", and getting back "Australian!"

Wouldn't people like to find out this kind of stuff? Thank you at least for reading all this! Cheers, Gutza 21:20, 19 July 2005 (UTC)

JESUS! THE UK RAILWAY SYSTEM!?

HOW MANY ARTICLES MUST THIS TAKE UP?! Example : Heathrow_Terminals_1,2,3_railway_station Category 16:34, 19 July 2005 (UTC)

Do you have any constructive criticism? Wiki is not paper. JRM · Talk 17:18, 19 July 2005 (UTC)

Jesus: the UK railway system - It's the best new religion since the worship of sliced bread... Er. JesseW 06:01, 22 July 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedia_talk:Summary_style#templates_to_make_summary_style_explicit

Discussion in need of people. --MarSch 09:56, 19 July 2005 (UTC)

Enhanced Request System

I'm not sure where I'm supposed to suggest this kind of thing, so I'll start here. This is my proposal: a voluntary system where users are able to declare their geographic location, industry and general expertise so they could receive custom-tailored alerts regarding article and image requests relevant to their personal data. This way someone requesting an article on, say, a landmark in Boston could send the request to users in Boston. Someone requesting an image of a piece of military equipment would have their request go to members of the armed forces. Someone wanting an image of a city in China could make sure that people in the area know of the request. It seems to me that such a system would greatly increase the number, quality and speed of contributions. Let me know what you guys think.--Daveswagon 15:15, 18 July 2005 (UTC)

Then we could turn the requests page into a special page, etc. Sounds like a good idea, but it needs to be implemented by developers. — Ilγαηερ (Tαlκ) 15:29, 18 July 2005 (UTC)

Is this something I have to take to that Bugzilla thing then? I'm unfamiliar with the process.--Daveswagon 15:36, 18 July 2005 (UTC)

If it were to be integrated into the software, it has to go to bugzilla (we sysops here have no control over the software itself, we can only do some minor SQL queries). If it involves categories as mentioned in the line below (a pretty good idea), it would just involve the creation of a few user categories, such as Category:Millenial Wikipedians. — Ilγαηερ (Tαlκ) 15:04, 19 July 2005 (UTC)

Look through the Categories, I've seen some User pages with a Category for a user location. (SEWilco 06:59, 19 July 2005 (UTC))

So are user categories the same thing as article categories? There's no way to really disseminate requests through categories besides writing to each individual user, is there?--Daveswagon 15:45, 19 July 2005 (UTC)

Nope. :( — Ilγαηερ (Tαlκ) 15:50, 19 July 2005 (UTC)

See Category:Regional Wikipedian notice boards for a listing of regional/national notice boards, which are intended for this very purpose. You could also look at Category:Wikiportals and consider asking for information on the talk page of an appropriate portal page. If you need something more specific, then I suggest you ask at Talk:Boston, Massachusetts or similar. If you are interested in answering other people's requests for local information, then I suggest you add any of the above that are relevant to you to your watchlist.-gadfium 00:29, 20 July 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Cleanup Taskforce could help too in this regard. - Mgm|^(talk) 10:27, July 20, 2005 (UTC)

Combining the Categories Conservation and Enviromentalism

I feel that since they are so close to the same thing, that conservation should be moved to a sub category of enviromentlism, or otherwise linked. Since the categories dont have active talk pages, I am posting it here for feedback. IreverentReverend 14:27, 18 July 2005 (UTC)

I think Category:Conservation is a bit of a mess right now. In principle, I'd expect more there about historical preservation.

I'm sure there is somewhere that discussion about categorization mainly takes place. IreverentReverend, someone else may have a better suggestion than I do, but maybe you could take this to Wikipedia talk:Categorization for some advice? -- Jmabel | Talk 05:06, July 19, 2005 (UTC)

Environmentalism: The theory that environment rather than heredity is the primary influence on intellectual growth and cultural development.
Conservation: The protection, preservation, management, or restoration of wildlife and of natural resources such as forests, soil, and water.

Seems subtle at first, but one represent a thought process, while the other, its action. Why not two articles, for there should be plenty of content for each? TTLightningRod

I added disambiguation text to Category:Conservation. (SEWilco 07:32, 19 July 2005 (UTC))

In the history of tree-huggers in the 20th century, these terms are distinctively used to draw the evolution of tree-huggin' thought. A conservationalist is idealized by Teddy, who sought to preserve beauty. The term environmentalism first appeared in the 50s/60s, to describe a more aggressive anthropomorphized view of nature. lots of issues | leave me a message 09:08, 19 July 2005 (UTC)

here is part of the intor from enviromentalism: It is a social movement which seeks to influence the political process by lobbying, education and activism in order to protect natural resources.

Here is part of the intro from conservation movment: The Conservation movement seeks to protect plant and animal species from harmful human influences.

That is what I based linking them on, seems to me that conservation is a subset of enviromentalism based on that, and in my experiance, other than enviromentalists being more political and on the fringe(often times... never see a conservation group acting like peta, alf, elf, or the like), they are basically the same... IreverentReverend 17:33, 19 July 2005 (UTC)

Right. They are the same except they are different. (SEWilco 06:03, 23 July 2005 (UTC))

A toolbox for messages

Forgive the slightly obscure section heading, but I was struggling for alternatives. Anyway, my suggestion (credit: Essjay & Ilyanep) is to create Wikipedia:Toolbox, and probably WP:TB as well. This would be along the lines of User:Smoddy/Tools. Does anyone have any objection to this? Cheers, smoddy 18:35, 17 July 2005 (UTC)

I think it's a very good tool, but could it perhaps be used for vandalism/spam too easily? It has some great potential. violet/riga (t) 20:28, 17 July 2005 (UTC)

The idea is that, when you put a user's name into the relevant box, you immediately are presented with the text already filled out in the page. All it then requires is a click on submit. Should save work for the RC patrol, methinks. smoddy 20:37, 17 July 2005 (UTC)

I learned earlier today what leaving these kinds of tools in obvious places can do; see here. I still think it has a lot of potential, but perhaps we should keep it out of the main line of sight. -- Essjay · Talk 20:32, July 17, 2005 (UTC)

There is that issue. Nevertheless, are you sure that was as a consequence of that? I thought he just copied the text straight from his own talkpage... Anyway, if people prefer it tucked away there, that's fine by me. smoddy 20:37, 17 July 2005 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure by the rapid fire way he did it that he was using the tool; my mistake for leaving it out in the open. However, I definately think it has promise. We're constantly hearing from new users how hard it is to find some things, but established users have no problem finding them, so I say we tuck it away in one of the not-so-dark corners of the wiki where good users can find it and vandals won't see it. -- Essjay · Talk 20:40, July 17, 2005 (UTC)

Perhaps a similar thing could be added as a special page accessible only by admins. violet/riga (t) 20:44, 17 July 2005 (UTC)

Add an [edit] or [edit top] button to the top of articles

I think it would be useful to have an [edit] link (not the same as "edit this page") at the top of articles so people don't have to download the whole article's source code just to edit something at the top. Take this page for example. The headline "Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)" would have an [edit] link on the right side of the page, just like normal headlines do.

This can be done already by h4x0ring the section edit url. Like This. That link will let you edit the top of the page only. The "section=0" means the top of the page. --pile0nades^{talk | contribs} 12:00, 17 July 2005 (UTC)

I just tested this on my user page and found no glitches. See this diff. I added some random text with the "edit this page" link, then removed it using the "section=0" link. --pile0nades^{talk | contribs} 12:11, 17 July 2005 (UTC)

See bug 156. r3m0t ^talk 12:44, July 17, 2005 (UTC)

<charinsert>s on MediaWiki:Copyrightwarning/ja

Could you add <charinsert>s on MediaWiki:Copyrightwarning/ja like MediaWiki:Copyrightwarning?--っ 15:44, 16 July 2005 (UTC)

Article about Chile deaths during Pinochet's presidency

Hi! Seeing that I originated the article on the Deaths in Ciudad Juarez, and, as Puerto Rican, I worry about the wellfare of all fellow Latin Americans in general, I wonder if anyone has written an article about the deaths and dissapearances of people during the Pinochet presidency. If not, Im interested in making an npov, very well researched article about it.

Thanks and God bless!

Sincerely yours, Antonio Latinos unidos por Siempre Martin

List of Menudo members

Since they are not just four (ex John, Paul, George and Ringo), but about 38, and divided into five eras, I thought I should make this,..what do you guys think?

Antonio should've been a Menudo Martin

Most of us here know nothing about the Menudo. Make it, and if it is deleted, you'll have your answer. r3m0t ^talk 13:14, July 17, 2005 (UTC)

"CommonsBot" or other Commons transwikiing system?

All the time I go to articles and find PD-labelled images. I'd like to bung a Commons tag on them and send them away, but the backlog of "now on Commons" is already huge. Plus there's also the problem of copying over versions and histories (as identified in the Criteria for Speedy Deletion poll).

Is it technically possible for all related data (not just the current image version) to be transferred, by bot or by human, from WP/WB/etc. to the Commons?

I think it's really a shame that we have this huge collection of images that ought to be on the Commons but currently have no way of getting them there except manually, and that cancels out uploader and version information.

So, what do you think? Is this possible? Is it stupid? Or is it just too much hard work? Garrett^Talk 03:38, 16 July 2005 (UTC)

Totally agree. - Omegatron 03:52, July 16, 2005 (UTC)

Personally, I've resisted transferring many images to Commons manually, on the assumption that we would soon get a tool to handle the job automatically. -- Solipsist 06:27, 16 July 2005 (UTC)

Hmm, I'm not so sure, for three reasons:

We should not underestimate the technical difficulties of transwiking accross projects, especially in the light of the citation requirements of GFDL.
As the procedure stands at the moment, a bot would only worsen the backlog on Category:NowCommons (currently several thousand images).
Many public domain images are poorly tagged (ie, they should have a more specific tag than {{PD}}) and some are wrongly tagged (ie, the image is not public domain). See User:Physchim62/German images for an example of the problems this can cause.

I am trying to work up the courage to start a WikiProject to address the last problem: it is much too large to be dealt with by a single user. Physchim62 11:50, 18 July 2005 (UTC)

Perhaps user IDs could be replicated. For example the username would link to the originating wiki's instance of that name, rather than to that name on Commons. That would surely keep the GFDL happy as it would be as if the image was (still) on the other wiki.
But it could tag them to be speedied instead, maybe with a special category, so sysops could just go through the list and delete them all.
certainly the improper tagging issue is a problem... there could maybe be some sort of "official tagging" system where sysops check the tag of "free-license" images and confirm or change the tag. It can be de- or re-tagged, but the "official" tag will always be the one the sysop applied. Or something.

Still, it's a problem... Garrett^Talk 23:39, 19 July 2005 (UTC)

A proposal to make images duplicated on commons a speedy deletion criterion has just failed (34% support). As for tagging, there is no need to restrict retagging to sysops: anyone can change a {{PD}} to a {{PD-USGov-NASA}} for example. It is more tricky for images which are in the wrong copyright family, but WP:PUI exists to try to sort them out (and there are other alternatives, such as persuading the uploader to tag as fair use). {{PD-self}} and {{GFDL-self}} can obviously only be put on by the original uploader. Physchim62 18:15, 20 July 2005 (UTC)
- "A proposal to make images duplicated on commons a speedy deletion criterion has just failed" Oh? Where was that? (SEWilco 18:38, 20 July 2005 (UTC))
  - It was here. As you can see, many of the objections involved issues of history, attribution, copyright status, liscencing, etc. If a proposal dealt only with images for which all those issues had been handled, I think it would pass with wide support, but the real problem is getting images to such a state. The ideal would be a way to transfer the images along with all their history and comments, but as mentioned above this is non-trivial. As for "official tagging" the point, I would think, would be that an "official" tag would be more trustworthy. How about a {{PD-Confirmed}} and a {{GDFL-Confirmed}} that would only be added by members of a Copyright-checking project and would included or be accompanied with a note on how the image was verified to fit one of these categories? Could this work? DES 15:06, 21 July 2005 (UTC)
- I don´t like the idea of {{PD-Confirmed}} at all. Images should be tagged under the most specific PD tag available and/or info should be included in the IDF to allow retagging to take place in the future. Don't forget that Wikipedia works on the principle that we trust the users, even though we recognise that they sometimes make mistakes (in good faith). Can I suggest that we get down to creating Wikipedia:WikiProject Image tagging, with Wikipedia:WikiProject PD images as its first offspring. See also WP:IT. Physchim62 11:58, 22 July 2005 (UTC)

Voting open on BC/AD vs BCE/CE proposal

Voting is now open on a proposal to amend the Manual of Style regarding era designations (the BC/AD vs. BCE/CE debate). Kaldari 19:50, 15 July 2005 (UTC)

controversial articles

Since others have already voiced some concern about controversial articles, I will add to the discussion here.

While I love the wiki, I have noticed that some articles are much more heated than others. For instance, the Islam page is currently under tight control. As I live in a very Muslim neighborhood in London, I can appreciate that. Those opposed to Islam may attempt to abuse the public mind by changing the tone of the article. However, the Islam article is not the only article that could be controversial. For that matter, any religious article (why are people always getting riled up?) could breed serious controversy. The Roman Catholic Church article has a fair share of criticism, much of which I hear as the voice of some disgruntled Catholic. I would strongly favor removal of the these whining critics. The wiki is about content, NOT criticism. Let readers draw their own conclusions and make their own criticisms. There is no reason to include that in an encyclopedia. If the wiki cannot separate the two, the wiki will end up being branded as yet another web board, full of rants and raves. Fortunately, the Catholic University, University of Notre Dame, article has been spared. However, another religious school--Brigham Young University--has not been spared. The article contains two tones of voice--an objective one and another that is, well, another voice. The Brigham Young University article is much different than, say, Oxford University or Harvard University article, whose President has been a source of controversy within the past year.

I think wikipedia can become better than the best (Britannica) which does not include a critics section, but in order to do so must be wary of letting a few people ruin it for the masses.

Wikipedia isn't politically correct (or, at least, I'm not). Our goal is to provide everything on a topic. If there have been critics, we list their complaints. If there have been supporters, we list their comments. Ideally there is a balance of views, like, say, three of each.

Yes the reader is meant to draw their own conclusions, but they need something to draw them from. Not every Wikipedia reader will sit down and consider the technical/legal/ethical/logistical/etc. side of a page. Garrett^Talk 09:12, 15 July 2005 (UTC)

Articles must have the Neutral Point of View. If you see an article that does not, please correct it, or address the matter on WP:RFC. Other than that, what exactly are you proposing? That we remove all opinions from all articles? Sorry to say, but that's hardly practical. R adiant _>|< 09:31, July 15, 2005 (UTC)

It is easy to feel that critism is unfounded in relation to an article that you personally support. But we need to apply the same standards across all articles. For instance, would you be happy if the Unification Church article contained no countering voice? -- Solipsist 10:37, 17 July 2005 (UTC)

Since it was specifically mentioned here, I'd like to note that I am the main author of the existing "criticism" section in the RCC article; I'm not a disgruntled Catholic, and I'm sorry if it sounds that way. I'm actually a decently respected Catholic scholar, and was trying to balance the section: the anti-Catholics wanted a fire and brimstone condemnation, and the pro-Catholics wanted it to be apologetic (in the theology sense). My efforts were an effort (and a requested effort at that) to end the mild edit war between the pros and cons. I don't mention that to suggest that I'm upset that someone doesn't like the section; that's nothing new, I've taken nothing but fire for my efforts. However, I do want it noted that the particular example used here was the result of a scholar's efforts, and not a disgruntled, whining Catholic. -- Essjay · Talk 16:53, July 17, 2005 (UTC)

redirect the sandbox?

Is it my imagination, or is the current "global" sandbox useless? I was just about to compose some text there (amongst several other people doing the same thing), but then someone blanked the whole page (losing the 4-5 then-current experiments), and while I was figuring out how to revert it, someone else blanked it again. Clearly it gets trashed all the time, which it seems to me would make it uselessly frustrating for someone trying to actually use it to test out some text or markup that required more than one editing cycle.

I've since learned that there are, in effect, per-user sandboxes that you can create as subpages of your user page. And that's fine.

So my suggestion is: is there any way we could change the many prominent "you can test edits in the sandbox" links to somehow suggest using your user page in this way, instead?

Steve Summit 18:11, 14 July 2005 (UTC)

There is no real need to save to the sandbox. You can experiment by doing repetitive previews. Actually you do not need a sandbox for that: any page will do. By using the sandbox you eliminate the risk that you press "save" by accident and ruin something real. If you want to keep your trials across sessions (days) you would be better off to cut/paste all text in the edit box to a local file on your PC. −Woodstone 18:30, July 14, 2005 (UTC)

Good idea, Steve, I added a line to Template:Please leave this line alone (sandbox heading).--Patrick 23:05, 14 July 2005 (UTC)

The Sandbox is still useful for anonymous users who don't have a userpage yet or have to share it with others. The sandbox is usually cleaned automatically by a bot, but since it's in for repairs after the MediaWiki upgrade it's done manually for some time. The sanbox clearly states it's just for testing. If you want to save something, it's best to register and use your userpage. - Mgm|^(talk) 12:59, July 15, 2005 (UTC)

Good point about the anonymous users. Wrt page clearing, though, I wasn't talking about the automatic, or periodic deliberate manual, purges, but rather what seem to be much-more-frequent replacements of the entire page (which might include 4-5 people's ongoing work) with one person's "comment", either as a result of vandalism or misunderstanding. (But yes, the result is the same.) Steve Summit 14:09, 15 July 2005 (UTC)

But isn't the sandbox basically for new users to learn thier way around without getting bitten? Isn't that why test1 says " Please use Wikipedia:Sandbox for any other tests you want to do, since testing in articles will be removed quickly."? I know I do all my testing (including article work) in my userspace sandboxes and then use the subst: command to automatically move it where I want. I wasn't even aware that there were regular editors (as opposed to new users) using the sandbox for testing; I thought it was just for the newbies to play. -- Essjay · Talk 16:33, July 17, 2005 (UTC)

edit page: special character shortcuts

On each edit page is an extensive list of self-inserting links for special characters, but (a) it uses Javascript which I rarely have turned on, and (b) it (that is, the complete list) displays ridiculously slowly on my browser, bogging down each and every edit page. I'd like to be bold and edit it myself to slap a <javascript> tag around it so that it doesn't display on non-Javascript-enabled browsers (which obviously won't be able to use it anyway) at all, but I don't know how to edit the edit template itself. But is this a good idea? Steve Summit 18:03, 14 July 2005 (UTC)

Without Javascript the list can still be used for copying a character. You can avoid displaying it with CSS line

#editpage-specialchars  { display: none}

I have the opposite problem: I like to display the characters but not the copyright notice etc., but they are within the id editpage-copywarn. Patrick 07:37, 15 July 2005 (UTC)

You could code a custom GreaseMonkey wrapper, although that requires Firefox and some rudimentary Javascript/CSS understanding. Check it out, it could likely fit your needs in a couple of lines. Garrett^Talk 07:43, 15 July 2005 (UTC)

proposal : wiki maps

Dear all,

An idea: a wiki for geographic information, e.g. maps or thematic coverages.

The maps included could be downloaded in various formats, e.g. PNG, GIF, JPG, PNM (for raster formats), or in a standard vector format. Thematic coverages could be stored / downloaded in an open spec/format, perhaps using a format like what PostGIS uses.

Wikipedia is good for storing textual information; this idea would cover spatial information.

People propose this constantly, but nobody writes the code. -- Cyrius|✎ 23:02, 12 July 2005 (UTC)

What would someone need to know and how competently to code features for Wikipedia? lots of issues | leave me a message 03:10, 13 July 2005 (UTC)

What you need to know depends on what you want to do. To write a useful Wikimaps? One would have to be a GIS expert. It's nowhere near as simple as simply allowing people to upload images or formatting text. -- Cyrius|✎ 19:54, 13 July 2005 (UTC)

Please see the notice at the top of the page - when you are proposing a new wiki-style project, go to m:Proposals for new projects and write about it there, not here. Note that this does not apply to WikiProjects. r3m0t ^talk 13:21, July 17, 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Votes For Addition

My meek proposal is a constructive version of our existing VfDs. Instead of creating an article that you're not sure about, you could put it on VfA and get commentary (for a week or so) about whether or not the article topic is up to Wikipedia's standards. At the end of the week, the votes would be tallied and the result of the vote put on your user talk page. Almafeta 23:46, 11 July 2005 (UTC)

What would be improved by this system? It seems to me that it would result in a bootleneck of article creations, and not really provide anything new. People can talk about the merits of a potential article until they're blue in the face, but as they said in my computer programming classes, "the proof is in the pudding." Wouldn't it be better to create an article, and then, only if it's merits are questioned, it could be discussed at Requests for Comments or Votes for Deletion. In the end I think our be bold policy is a central one to wikipedia, especially when it comes to creating new articles. — Asbestos | Talk 16:03, 12 July 2005 (UTC)

It wouldn't stop anyone from being bold. It would just stop people from creating a full article only to have it deleted two weeks later because it's not up to Wikipedia's standards of notability. Almafeta 08:38, 13 July 2005 (UTC)

One: Reading "What Wikipedia Is Not" and "Bad article ideas" should be a must for newbies. If they are still wondering if the subject is article worthy, they can always ask here or on the Help desk, a WikiProject or someone personally. Two: A lot of articles get deleted for a serious lack of content instead of a non-notable subject. Those wouldn't be helped with this proposal. - 131.211.210.15 10:08, 13 July 2005 (UTC)
I suppose there could be an Articles for construction page with subpages slated for deletion in a short period unless someone decides to copy the content to a live page. It would give people a workspace for gathering stuff which they aren't sure will grow into an article, as well as yet another way for editors of stubs to find stuff to work on. Perhaps two lists: Public and Personal areas, with the latter labeled to discourage others from editing the articles during original author's initial assembly work. I don't know if there are people who would be interested in the concept, but at a minimum it would be a place to have sandboxes which a bot could automatically delete without adding to VfD load. (SEWilco 06:56, 15 July 2005 (UTC))

Eh, what the heck, nobody will notice this plug anyway. Wikipedia:Countdown deletion is nothing like this but is vaguely related. In spirit. Yeah, that's it. JRM · Talk 19:08, 22 July 2005 (UTC)

Expanding the availability of PostScript abbreviations for special characters on Wikipedia, especially for the International Phonetic Alphabet

I would like see more PostScript codes available on Wikipedia for display of special characters. I'm tired of having to look up the numerical Unicode codes for every single special character whose code I don't know by heart. I'm also tired of having to learn by heart those counter-intuitive Unicode numbers. For example, why doesn't the schwa appear when I type &schwa;? Things like "ì" ("igrave" for i with grave accent) or "ε" (epsilon) work, but many others don't. Why didn't Wikipedia adopt all PostScript codes at once? It would be more economical for users to learn to type those semi-intuitive PostScript codes than those counter-intuitive Unicode codes. 2004-12-29T22:45Z 22:39, 11 July 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedia uses the HTML codes, and doesn't interpret them; they are in fact passed verbatim to your browser. They are not PostScript codes, and they mostly cover ISO Latin 1 only. The W3C has the official list. --cesarb 23:24, 11 July 2005 (UTC)

I find the tables here very convenient. Bovlb 23:58:03, 2005-07-12 (UTC)

Adding a speedy deletion warning to the new article message

As has been shown on the VP, some new users get baddly bitten by innocently creating articles that fall into the speedy deletion criteria without knowing of their existance. Here's an example of a new user feeling attacked due to getting a partially written article speedily deleted.

There is a simple change that would help with this problem: a well-formed warning on MediaWiki:Newarticletext providing a link to WP:CSD. Some new users who otherwise would never know of the existance of Speedy Deletion would read it, and not create articles that would fall under it's criteria. This would be a win for everyone.

I brought this up on the talk page about a month ago, and got no response, hopefully this will generate one. I've listed a possible text at MediaWiki talk:Newarticletext#Adding_a_speedy_deletion_warning - feel free to comment either here or there; I'll move any comments added here to the talk page when this discussion is archived. JesseW 06:55, 11 July 2005 (UTC)

That would save everyone a bunch of trouble. Howabout1 ^{Talk to me!} 22:41, July 11, 2005 (UTC)

I support this. I added a slight revision at Newarticletext#Adding_a_speedy_deletion_warning but the precise version doesn't matter to me. DES 22:50, 20 July 2005 (UTC)

Seems like a good idea. Rd232 10:00, 22 July 2005 (UTC)

Let the user choose if to download images when requesting articles and image tag 'needed'

It should be possible to choose whether to download images or not when requesting an article (for speed pourposes) but, more important, when downloading a wiki-dump, for space pourposes.

Moreover make it possible to tag an image as 'needed' to signal images that are indispensable for understanding the article (like a graph on a math article).

So let the user choose if to download the only-text dump, the one with only 'needed' images or the complete one.

Don't shoot me!! This came to my mind because I have to leave on holyday with my notebook and I need the wiki math section but I have no disk space. --Zimbricchio 23:51, 9 July 2005 (UTC)

Um, this has immediate problems. First of all, there would be currently no images tagged as needed. Secondly, the majority of images we use here are for illustration purposes; if you're reading about Harley Davidsons you need to know what they look like. And how do you decide what images aren't needed? Shouldn't "frivilous" images be excluded anyway?

First: there is a beginning for every change in policy. With time all the stuff will be consistent.

Second: it's up to the author to decide wheter an image is 'needed' or not.

I wouldn't tag as 'needed' a writer's photo in his biography since I don't think it's the important feature of the article.

Nor in the case of a Harley Davidson, since I don't really need it in order to have a rough idea of it (remember that it's for space pourposes so something has to be lost).

Instead in the case of this theorem, the image is necessary, not only because it's difficult to explain using words but also because who wrote the text put the image 'in order to explain'.

Think if you downloaded the text-dump to read articles on your notebook during a 12 hours travel and you realize that such an image is missing and an entire part of the article becomes nonsense.

Maybe it's only for wiki-maniacs ;) :| :(

--Zimbricchio 15:17, 10 July 2005 (UTC)

Good idea, bad idea, if you know what I mean. Garrett^Talk 01:40, 10 July 2005 (UTC)

As far as articles goes, just set your web browser preferences. Pretty much all web browsers let you disable image downloading, since on low-speed lines this can be the difference between "responsive" and "unbearable." In Firefox, select edit/preferences, select teh "web features" left-hand-side tab, and unclick "load images". Dwheeler 04:01, July 17, 2005 (UTC)

Create different "reference desks" for every topic

Speaking of reference, I think there should be more "reference desks", each one for a different topic. That way we would create division of labor, and the answers of the "reference desks" would get answered more easily. 2004-12-29T22:45Z July 9, 2005 17:51 (UTC)

I found this idea great, so I posted the same suggestion into the Reference desk talk page. 500LL 12:52, July 10, 2005 (UTC)

Please continue this discussion there, not here. r3m0t ^talk 13:23, July 17, 2005 (UTC)

Alternate link text, special case

I'm sure I'm not alone in being tired of creating the following kind of links:

 [[largemouth bass|largemouth]], [[smallmouth bass|smallmouth]], and [[white bass]]

For the many, many cases where you want a link with alternative text display where the alternative text is a substring of the link text, I would propose that a markup be added such as

 [[~largemouth~ bass]], [[~smallmouth~ bass]], and [[white bass]]

which would mean only display the text enclosed in tildes. This would be in addition to the pipe markup, not a replacement for it. Could save a lot of typing, and besides, it's more elegant. ;-) -- Mwanner July 7, 2005 18:40 (UTC)

Thanks for suggesting this! I'm of two minds about it... On one hand, I love the cutting down on typing, on the other, it makes it harder for newbies to understand the markup. Now that I think about it, the best way would to make it an input only syntax. Specifically, you could type it in that way, and it would be reformed into the current syntax as it was saved, so nobody would need to memorize it to read markup, but it could be used as a convience for writing markup. And best of all, it could be written as a user script. Anybody? JesseW 21:26, 9 July 2005 (UTC)

BTW this idea should be added as bugzilla feature request, and maybe should be mentioned on the talk page of Wikipedia:Tools too, as an idea for a tool someone should write... JesseW 21:32, 9 July 2005 (UTC)

Lovely idea but please don't use ~ , it's not present on every keyboard, why not use ^ ? ... --Zimbricchio 09:01, 10 July 2005 (UTC)

I'd hate to add yet another special character to our zoo of {{[[:|]]}}. How about simply using pipe symbols like this?:

[[|largemouth| bass]]
generally: [[prefix for article |display text| postfix for article]] — Sebastian (talk) 00:20, July 12, 2005 (UTC)

The user script approach would considerably limit the number of users who could employ it. And the pipe character strikes me as being too easily confused with the present markup, which must be retained. And while I am surprised to find that tilde (~) is not a character available on all keyboards (isn't this how posts are signed?), I have no problem with substituting the caret for the tilde. Might look slightly more intuitive, too.

I'll hold off another day or two before submitting to Bugzilla, in case other suggestions/objections arise. -- Mwanner 13:54, July 12, 2005 (UTC)

Please see the notice at the top of the page - when a proposal involves a change to the software, go to the bug tracker (which also does feature requests) and file a new bug there. (and yes I know bugzilla was already mentioned) r3m0t ^talk 13:26, July 17, 2005 (UTC)

It's also worth noting that your babblings here are completely useless. I don't think any large feature request has been implemented recently without being in Bugzilla. The place for objections is there (a permanent record), not here. r3m0t ^talk 13:26, July 17, 2005 (UTC)

Well, not completely useless-- I didn't want to put this in Bugzilla without getting a reaction here first. And, indeed, the suggestion to use ^ not ~ was a good one. -- Mwanner 15:54, July 21, 2005 (UTC)

Major cleanup confusion

I've been here about a month now, poking about, looking for articles that need cleaning up. But, just when I think I've finally found all the categories and pages listing articles in need of help, I discover a whole new set. This has become confusing and tiresome, so I started a list to keep them straight.

Some of these pages are just links to other categories/pages. However, most of them are lists of articles. I did a rough count, finding more than 13,200 articles listed. There is no easy way to tell what articles may be duplicated in this count and this total does not include the 19 large dump files of the punctuation project. Also, the Wikipedia:Pages_needing_ attention (802 articles and subpage 540) and Special:Ancient_pages (1,051) lists do not specify what sort of fix has been requested, so these may include stubs and who knows what else.

Limiting this to just those categories/pages that call for actual editing, not disambiguation, fact-checking, copyright, etc., here is my list so far.

To my mind, this is a mess of major proportions, both awful and awesome. I checked around the Village Pump and found no mention of this, which was a surprise. Doesn't anyone else have a problem with this? Or is it just too vast to even discuss?

Although it is difficult to pick out a structure here, the articles seem to have been sorted out according to three schemes: 1) when someone requested a fix; 2) what sort of fix was requested; and 3) alphabetically by title with a very few subject subcategories.

I can understand why it might be useful to have three different ways of sorting articles. What bothers me is that I only stumbled on some of these huge lists by accident, while poking about. I suspect a massive duplication of effort and content and I can verify that there is serious confusion for a newbie such as myself (which may turn off those who are eager to help).

In keeping with the Wikipedia exhortation to be bold, I have a few ideas on how to address this.

I think we need a much clearer delineation between cleanup and maintenance. A page listing which tasks go with which major category would be useful. We have some things similar, such as Wikipedia:Cleanup, but which don't really resolve what I see as a current ambiguity.
I think we need to have one page showing the three different ways of sorting articles in need of cleanup and all the links necessary to get to any list in any of the three schemes (by date, by work needed, alphabetical).
I think we need to look at all the cleanup and maintenance categories and weed out those that are not used or are not useful, disposing of their associated templates as well. For example, Category:Wikipedia_articles_needing_their_fiction_made_clear has just one article listed.
I think we need to drop use of the {attention} tag and dump those articles listed on Wikipedia:Pages_needing_ attention and Wikipedia:Pages_needing_attention/Maintenance into the Special:Ancient_pages list, bringing its total to ca. 2,400 articles. At that point, it would be necessary to view each one and decide whether it, in fact, needs attention and what kind of attention, adding the appropriate tags, including the one stating that it has been more than six months since cleanup was requested, {cleanuplo}.
I think we need to go through the articles listed under Category:Wikipedia_cleanup (6,600 articles) and do the same thing, parceling them out into type of cleanup (or type of maintenance) needed.
I think we need to keep the pages listing articles to be cleaned up by date of request. However, I think the Category:Cleanup_leftovers page is redundant to Special:Ancient_pages.

Well, now. There. I've been bold. I await your responses. Jekoko 29 June 2005 19:53 (UTC)

Did you look at the WikiProject Stub sorting? Some time ago, there was only one category, Category:Stub, which was really huge. That project managed to sort all the stubs on the hierarchical tree you can see at Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Stub types, making it much easier to find stubs related to an area you know of. Maybe something like that should be done to the cleanup templates/pages. By the way, you cannot add anything to Special:Ancientpages, since it's automatically generated. --cesarb 29 June 2005 20:13 (UTC)

I just took a look at the stub project. Impressive. Doing something like this for cleanup ought to be do-able. I don't see any real need to have articles sorted by subject, like the stubs. Do you? Can you tell me how the Special:Ancient_pages list is automatically generated? Thanks. Jekoko 30 June 2005 01:56 (UTC)

Special:Ancientpages is not any request. It's just pages which might be outdated because they haven't been edited in a while. Oldest pages appear first. r3m0t ^talk June 30, 2005 06:17 (UTC)

Thanks for the info. So an article listed on Ancient Pages might be perfectly fine, only showing up because there was nothing wrong with it and thus no one has changed it in years. Well, then we can lop off a thousand articles or so from my total, and revise my number 4 suggestion above to reflect this. Let's combine the Pages needing attention and its subpage and work from that. As for number 6, Cleanup leftovers is not redundant to Ancient Pages, but it would be much clearer for a newbie if this fact could be mentioned on both these pages. Jekoko 30 June 2005 15:18 (UTC)

First, I just want to offer you my sympathy for noticing and trying to work on this problem - I also noticed this when I was getting familiar with Wikipedia - User:Beland has done good work since then, but as you noticed, it's still a monumental mess.

Regarding Category:Wikipedia_articles_needing_their_fiction_made_clear, it had 25 articles in it a few weeks ago - I cleaned all of them out at once. ;-) It is useful (although an argument could be made that anyone who bothers to notice the problem might as well just fix it (but people won't, so a notice is useful)). I'll have some more reactions after I've looked at your list some more... JesseW 2 July 2005 07:17 (UTC)

I've responded more on the Talk page. Again, glad you are doing this. JesseW 2 July 2005 07:25 (UTC)

JesseW and I are discussing this issue more at Talk page. If anyone is interested, please join in! Jekoko 8 July 2005 17:10 (UTC)

The reason why articles in need of attention/clenup should be sorted by category is that many people will look at a category they know soemthign about and are interested in, pick an article, and work on it. if you have to go throiugh a huge list sorted by date or article title alone, it will be ahrd to find anything, and many people will just give up. i have found and worked on several articels via the sub-pages of the pages needing attention list. The stubsorting project might be a model, but remeber that has been a LOT of work by many people, and in many ways it is easier than dealing with articles that are beyond stubs, althoguh not in good shape. You might also need to sort based on kind of work needed: copyedits, style, factcheckign, cite sources, expansion, etc. DES 22:21, 20 July 2005 (UTC)

Help categories

I'm thinking that our stub categories could be complemented by "Help" categories. That is, we could have something like "Foo articles that need help" or "... need special help", if they need cleanup or wikification or are disputed, etc.

That way these articles (and possibly categories) might be more likely to get the attention of people who care more and know more about the given subject.

The discussion is at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Categories. Maurreen (talk) 08:18, 4 August 2005 (UTC)

incorporating music into wikipedia

this may have been brought up before but I didn't see anything about it when I read the other topics.

I'd like it if Wikipedia would incorporate music files into some entries. For example a classical muscian should also have music files in their entries just as they have picture files. On this subject we really need to break free from the conventional conception of what an encyclopedia should be.

Music is quite welcome. The problem is finding music which has acceptable copyright terms. -- Cyrius|✎ 02:00, 4 August 2005 (UTC)

Neutral Wikipedia?

Dear all

I am writting about the issue of Macedonia, Republic of Macedonia, Macedonian Slavs (like Wikipedia calls the Macedonians) and the problem between Macedonia and Greece about the term Macedonia. Rant snipped

Stop spamming this everywhere. -- Cyrius|✎ 21:26, 3 August 2005 (UTC)

Snipping duplication is fine, but if someone knows where the actual content is, could you please link? -- Jmabel | Talk 06:26, August 4, 2005 (UTC)

Here is a link to the whole text of my complaint: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28policy%29#Neutral_Wikipedia.3F

The new masthead

Or whatever it's called - "From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit". Possible I missed it before but it seems new. Is there an ongoing discussion of this somewhere? I think it's too wordy, should go back to just "From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia". Tualha (Talk) 00:37, 3 August 2005 (UTC)

Whose stupid idea was this? It looks ridiculous. BLANKFAZE | (что??) 00:58, 3 August 2005 (UTC)
- Grr. It's at MediaWiki:Tagline. I reverted this. Things like this that affect sitewide appearance should be discussed. BLANKFAZE | (что??) 01:05, 3 August 2005 (UTC)
  - "Tagline"...yeah, that's a good word. Thanks. Tualha (Talk) 01:17, 3 August 2005 (UTC)

"WikiMaps" A new kind of wiki ?

Moved to Wikipedia:Village pump (perennial proposals)

Maps

Map of pangasinan

http://www.pangasinan.gov.ph/theprovince/towncity.htm

http://www.pangasinan.gov.ph/theprovince/map.htm

http://www.pangasinan.org/surfmap.htm

I hope wikipedia could make a detailed political map of pangasinan with its towns and cities.

Making Search Engine non-case-sensitive

I see a lot of redirections of articles merely because the search engine is case-sensitive. Would it not be better to make the search engine non-case-sensitive, just like Yahoo and Googles, so that these redirections can be avoided?

Also, it would be good if the search engine can propose the closest alternative keywords, should there be a typo error or if the user does not know the correct spelling. Isn't this what other search engines are doing? PM Poon 14:56, 2 August 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Deletion reform

Ed's rash actions today got me to thinking about the different proposals to reform the Deletion process. So I have created a page to discuss these proposals and try and extract some implementable policy from them. Wikipedia:Deletion reform. Note the "please edit" note. Thanks! humblefool ®^{Deletion Reform} 20:51, 1 August 2005 (UTC)

Elaborate on "Ed's rash actions" please. --Golbez 21:01, August 1, 2005 (UTC)

It refers to him deleting VfD. -- Joolz 21:19, 1 August 2005 (UTC)

That is quite rash, and I hope that he was immediately de-admin'd. —Mike 16:32, August 2, 2005 (UTC)

He wasn't, because most of us agree with him. --Golbez 17:19, August 2, 2005 (UTC)

Agreeing that VfD is broken is a far different thing from agreeing that pulling the rug out from under everyone was a good thing. -- Cyrius|✎ 21:33, 2 August 2005 (UTC)

It was a lot effective than that Speedy proposal. --Golbez 21:36, August 2, 2005 (UTC)

For more on this issue see:

An RFC about the deletion of the VfD page (since undeleted): Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Deletion of VFD.
A vote on the deletion of the VfD page: Wikipedia:Requests for deletion.

Paul August ☎ 15:01, August 3, 2005 (UTC)

Template:Test wording

A couple months ago a user noted that most vandals don't necessary add junk, they delete and change information as well, and so the template ought to read that their edits have been "reverted" not "removed". I agreed, and have made several prompting comments in the talk page ever since to see if anyone else cares or has an opinion, but since the template is protected I can't be bold and change anything myself. No one has yet voiced any opinions. Should the change be made, or are there reasons against? — Asbestos | Talk 16:03, 1 August 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Featured sounds ?

What with featured articles and featured pictures, I think it may be approaching time to establish a process for featured sounds. This would be for recorded music as well as for "sound portrait"-type illustrations of articles: birdsong, the shouts of a crowded marketplace, a running steam engine. I think Spoken Wikipedia articles, though, as they are basically text-based, wouldn't be appropriate for this (though of course they would be improved by the inclusion of these sounds). I realize that there aren't many sounds on Wikipedia as of yet, but I think that establishing a featuring process will encourage more exceptional recordings to be collected by Wikipedians. What do you all think?--Pharos 23:16, 31 July 2005 (UTC)

I think this is an excellent idea. There a quite a few good sound recordings already, perhaps more than most of us realise. I think that by allowing sounds to be elevated to featured status more contributors migt be encouraged to supply them. However, I think ther will have to be strict guidelines from the outset about what might constitute a featured sound: after all, a featured article requires a lot of work. --Gareth Hughes 10:12, 1 August 2005 (UTC)

I think a very good idea over-all. I think the requirements should be much like the Featured Pictures: that is, be both highly informative within the context of the article, and be aesthetically and technically pleasing. — Asbestos | Talk 16:03, 1 August 2005 (UTC)

I've experimentally created Wikipedia:Featured sound candidates and copied this discussion to Wikipedia talk:Featured sound candidates. Let's continue the discussion there.--Pharos 03:59, 11 August 2005 (UTC)

Installed great; Can't Post

I installed MediaWiki. It set up fine. I adjusted the pages and modified one graphic, following instructions. I can manipulate the main page and some of the help pages, and I've added categories, but I can't get it to add stories. Every time I do a search, instead of offering to allow me to add something on the subject, it says "trying full text search" and won't offer a link to establish a new subject.

What is going wrong?

This is not the right place to post ("proposals"?) - but the answer is at m:MediaWiki_FAQ#How_do_I_show_a_link_to_create_a_page_when_searches_fail.3F r3m0t ^talk 23:00, July 31, 2005 (UTC)

GPS-Tagged Wiki articles

Would it be possible to add extra metadata to a wiki article that contains GPS coordinates? This way, if you happened upon an area of interest with your Wikipedia-linked cell phone, it might discover an interesting tidbit of information that geographically hot. For instance, you might be wandering around the shores of Thermopylae in Greece and get a history lesson, or you might be driving along I-90 near Mitchell, South Dakota, and receive a download about the Corn Palace. I think it would be neat and not terribly difficult, but of course I'd like to propose this to the gods of Wikipedia.

There are already a lot of articles that contain geographical coordinates, often using a standardized template. See Wikipedia:WikiProject Geographical coordinates. For example, if you click on the coordinates in the infobox at Boston, you are directed to a number of map sites. So the possibility to add metadata is there. How to let that data interact with your GPS device, I don't know. Eugene van der Pijll 18:22, 31 July 2005 (UTC)

Very cool -- I didn't see GPS coordinates on other articles so I wasn't sure. We might also need to add an extra metadata element, "planetary body", since invariably over time articles on Mars, the moon, etc. will need coordinates on those systems as well.

Cease-fire on eras

I've suggested a cease-fire on eras, at the Village pump. Maurreen (talk) 09:39, 29 July 2005 (UTC)

Nutrition information template

I'd like to propose a nutrition information template (infobox) for the various food articles. It should be possible using CSS to build a template that looks a lot like the nutrition information provided on the sizes of boxes, rather than scanning in the image. Anybody interested? Thanks! — RJH 21:54, 28 July 2005 (UTC)

Fair use image validation

There are large numbers of images tagged as being "fair use" on Wikipedia. These range from the eminently reasonable (there would be no other way to get an equivilent image; an example would be Image:1966 final bobby moore.jpg) to the completely unreasonable (another image could easily be gained; this is particularly true of cars—an example would be Image:2000 Dodge Intrepid.jpg). These invalid "fair use" images damage Wikipedia's reputation (imagine the librarians when they discovered that we were using these images: what an example to set to the children!), and they also lay us open to suits for copyright infringement. I feel this is an unacceptable state of affairs. I am therefore proposing setting up Wikipedia:Fair use validation, as a process to validate fair use claims before sending them to WP:IfD. IfD doesn't really allow proper discussion, as it is a very cloistered and busy page. A proper fair use forum would allow us to clarify fair use claims, improve the copyright status of the encyclopedia and Wikipedia's reputation in all. Do people think this is a good idea? Are you with me? Cheers, [[smoddy]] 20:25, 28 July 2005 (UTC)

I have been pointed on IRC to Wikipedia:Requested copyright examinations. However, I don't feel this addresses the same issue. That was just a vague attempt at examining copyrights. I guess what I am proposing is a large-scale attempt to verify (and cut down) the use of fair-use on Wikipedia. Perhaps this would be impractical. Suggestions welcome... [[smoddy]] 21:37, 28 July 2005 (UTC)

You could set it up as being similar to Wikipedia:Image sleuthing — create a page with ten or so images always up for discussion. For each image, the outcome of the discussion could result in its being tagged {{Verifieduse}} or being sent to WP:IfD. But what's your scope? Are you hoping to go through every fairuse picture here and check them? Or would only images under contention be brought to Wikipedia:Fair use validation for discussion? — Asbestos | Talk 12:56, 29 July 2005 (UTC)

The process is basically what I was suggesting. Depending on the amount of people involved in the project, I can envisage it being a place where fair-use claims are suggested as being bogus, then the uploader being invited to comment. As to the scope, I guess I was suggesting is a project to verify possibly bogus claims of fair-use. I'm sure that you recognise the tendency for fairuse claims to really mean "this image is copyrighted and I want to use it". I am suggesting going through Category:Fair use images, and finding images that particular users don't think are valid. I am basically suggesting this here in the hope that I will get support, or people thinking the project is wholly unviable. Which do you think? [[smoddy]] 13:09, 29 July 2005 (UTC)

Personally I think the idea is fine, and I'd be glad to help. I'd like to know a little bit more about the history of proposals like this in the past, though. At Wikipedia:Fair_use#Tagging_files, it mentions "For a while there was a proposed discussion system for fair use images. While it was little used...". Not knowing the history of that system, it would be good to know what happened to it, and why it had such little support. Either way, though, I'd be happy to help start it up again if there are no reasons against it. — Asbestos | Talk 13:17, 29 July 2005 (UTC)

Permanently deleting page versions

People asking questions at the Reference Desk or elsewhere often leave their email addresses for other to contact them. Well-meaning wikipedians then often remove these email addresses, to prevent address harvesters from collecting their addresses for spam. However, does this action do anything? Unlike a regular web page, our archives are freely explorable, and easy for a spider to reach through the links to the history we provide. We think of them as disappearing, but to a machine a previous version of a page is just another web page.

Would there be no way for these email addresses to be abolished? Obviously we can say that it's the poster's own darn fault and leave it at that, but I think that it's important that there ought to be some way to permanently delete information from a page on Wikipedia. Imagine if someone's kid or jealous ex decided to post their credit card details on a page. There would be no way to permanently delete that information without deleting the entire page, which we obviously couldn't do if it were an established article.

I propose that a system be implemented in which an admin be able to permanently expunge a version of a page and replace it with a version without the unwanted information. The page history would simply skip that version, or show that it had existed and was replaced. As much as technically possible, we ought to implement a system such that there should be no way for a spider or harvester to collect email addresses or other vital information — accidentally or maliciously posted — simply by crawling though our pages. — Asbestos | Talk 14:09, 28 July 2005 (UTC)

Couldn't we handle this just as well by marking links to history pages or old versions with "nofollow" attributes, so that spiders won't crawl them, but they are still available to humans? DES 15:12, 28 July 2005 (UTC)

This is already done. -- Cyrius|✎ 16:26, 28 July 2005 (UTC)

Would this really stop spam-bots? gkhan 07:34, July 29, 2005 (UTC)

At any rate, those "well-meaning wikipedians" should not be removing those email addresses. The person asking the question obviously included their e-mail address so that someone could mail them an answer. Removing the e-mail address makes a private response impossible.

Munging e-mail addresses destroys the usability of the internet, which is supposed to be about communication. If individuals want to mung their e-mail addresses in a attempt to reduce spam, that's one thing, but no one else should "helpfully" do it for them, because it doesn't help, and does hurt. google groups is currently doing this, and it sucks. Steve Summit 14:35, 30 July 2005 (UTC)

The help and reference desks clearly ask people NOT to leave their email adress and return here for an answer. If they can't be bothered to check in for an answer, why should we bother protecting them or even answering for that matter? - Mgm|^(talk) 10:38, August 2, 2005 (UTC)

True, people probably shouldn't delete addresses. However, it is no harm to de-spammify them -- i.e. changing [email protected] into john DOT doe AT isp DOT com. I will often do that. [[smoddy]] 10:44, 2 August 2005 (UTC)

Admins can selectively delete revisions from a page. It's just a very tedious process (especially on pages with massive histories), and will tend not to be done unless there's an extremely good reason for it. Cyrius 16:26, 28 July 2005 (UTC)

The same problem came up on Harry Potter recently, when someone posted a copy of the book. It was quickly reverted. However, the page had 3000 edits, so it would have taken the admin one heck of a long time to do it. Therefore a request was made for a developer to do it, as they can run a very simple SQL query. So the short answer to the original question is no, but others can. Whether they will is a different matter. Cheers, [[smoddy]] 16:40, 28 July 2005 (UTC)

Ok, cool. I'm glad that there's a system in place, though it doesn't sound like a particularly easy or efficient system. It seems a pity that it's so difficult to do, as that basically prevents admins from easily removing people's adresses, which I think would be important if there were an easy system in place, but I guess it can be used for the more important stuff.

As for DES's question, nofollow attributes don't have any legal bindings. Search engines agree to abide by them, partly because it helps prevent rank influencing through linkspam, but there's nothing preventing a spam-bot from following any link it can see. — Asbestos | Talk 12:48, 29 July 2005 (UTC)

Page statistics

Is there any way to get hit statistics for a specific page? Like so an author can track how long people stay on a page and what they do when they get there. Website analysis software is very popular and highly useful to all webmasters. Aren't we all webmasters in a way? I think it would be useful to know how my changes affect the flow of traffic between pages for one. I propose that a statistics tab be added to every page right alongside of the other "tabs": discussion, history, watch, etc. Tubelius 09:54, 26 July 2005 (UTC)

There used to be a simple hit-counter for each page (ie how many times it had been accessed) but I think they removed because it was something of a server-hog and didn't really tell anyone anything ("Hmmm.. the most accessed page after Main Page is Penis. Interesting...."). I don't think there is a big chance that it, or indeed anything more advanced, will be put back. There is a page for more "global" statistics like project-size at Wikipedia:Statistics. gkhan 10:41, July 26, 2005 (UTC)

Well a hit counter is coutinuously updated and takes resources with every hit. That is no good. However a page analyzer can be run once a day during slow times. Plus I am talking about data that would be more useful. Tubelius 18:44, 26 July 2005 (UTC)

Please Express Your Objection

There’s someone proposing a policy to close some minor, slow-growing, “hopeless” wikipedias on the wikimedia meta-wiki. (see [5]) This proposal is the enemy to the openness of the whole wikipedia community. I come here to inform you to express your opinion there. I think it's OK to use your own language on on the talk page. Thank you. --Theodoranian 19:58, 25 July 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedia-related collaboration

I noticed that some content in the wikipedia: namespace and quite some self-related content in the article namespace could use some collaboration, and am starting to devellop the idea of a Wikipedia-related collaboration. Are there any people interested? Circeus 17:42, July 25, 2005 (UTC)

Good idea, if enough are interested. See Wikipedia:WikiProject Wikipedia Namespace. I would be willing to help. A related possibility is a "Maintenance" COTW, which could work on the Wikipedia namespace and various backlogs, such as clearing VFDs, categorizing, article cleanup, and RFCs. Maurreen (talk) 16:01, 30 July 2005 (UTC)

Great Ideas. CG 05:34, August 2, 2005 (UTC)

OK, I'm starting Wikipedia:Maintenance collaboration. See you there. Maurreen (talk) 04:02, 3 August 2005 (UTC)

Status Indicator

About a week ago, I created an indicator system to note whether I am online or not at a given time. Several other users who had been using different systems (or no system at all) have picked up on it and begun using it. In an effort to offer it to a larger audience, I've created Wikipedia:Status. Please take a look and offer thoughts; if you like it, consider giving it a test drive. -- Essjay · Talk 05:55, July 25, 2005 (UTC)

Please reply at Wikipedia talk:Status. r3m0t ^talk 10:28, July 25, 2005 (UTC)

Medicine collaboration of the fortnight?

I am considering starting a medicine collaboration of the fortnight (of course, it could be a week if there were enough people), and I would like to see if there is any interest in participating in this. As I see it, this would involve both pre-clicinal topics (like anatomy, biochemistry, and so on) and clinical topics (diseases, laboratory tests, surgical procedures, and so on). Lay people would be very welcome—both to express a desire for specific articles to be improved, and to help ensure that the articles aren't too technical (or at least that the broad themes can be easily understood). Of course, no one would be obligated to help. Would anyone be interested? If so, please leave a note here or on my talk page. Thanks! — Knowledge Seeker দ 04:06, July 25, 2005 (UTC)

I've started it up at Wikipedia:WikiProject Clinical medicine/MCOTF (WP:MCOTF). Please come join us. Everyone is welcome. — Knowledge Seeker দ 04:26, July 26, 2005 (UTC)

Reformat the appearance of the edit page - pretty please

Can we please bring the copyright notice to the top (Ideal example)? Copy and paste dumping is pervasive among anons (easily verifiable if you patrol the new article creation page). The current note is either being ignored or unseen. Despite the bold caps text, the note could be easily unseen by a drop in once or twice editor, who will not bother to scan group of text that the copyright note is buried in. I consider discouraging copyright the most important instruction we can give, so can we please bring it from the bottom to the top? lots of issues | leave me a message 01:25, 25 July 2005 (UTC)

I'd say, why bother? there's a pink sign on top of the help desk and still people ask reference desk questions there. I'm pretty sure it won't be read. - Mgm|^(talk) 10:25, August 2, 2005 (UTC)

An option in preferences to hide reverted edits.

This would make history pages look MUCH better IMHO.It would work like this: With the option on, you look at a history page (say, of George W. Bush) and things like this would be gone (this was pulled right off the top, lol):

# (cur) (last)  03:19, 10 August 2005 Zzyzx11 m (Reverted edits by 172.153.39.187 to last version by NoSeptember)
# (cur) (last) 03:17, 10 August 2005 172.153.39.187
# (cur) (last) 03:16, 10 August 2005 NoSeptember m (→Presidential campaigns - more concise)
# (cur) (last) 03:04, 10 August 2005 Bmicomp m (Reverted edits by 172.153.39.187 to last version by Gidonb)
# (cur) (last) 03:01, 10 August 2005 172.153.39.187
# (cur) (last) 02:54, 10 August 2005 Gidonb (rv; sick!)
# (cur) (last) 02:53, 10 August 2005 172.153.39.187 (Fuck Bush and Fuck the War in Iraq. Bush is a War Criminal and is well known to be a Cocksucker of the First Order)
# (cur) (last) 02:50, 10 August 2005 Everyking m (Reverted edits by 172.153.39.187 to last version by Gamaliel)
# (cur) (last) 02:49, 10 August 2005 172.153.39.187
# (cur) (last) 01:34, 10 August 2005 Gamaliel m (Reverted edits by 70.150.37.32 to last version by MONGO)
# (cur) (last) 01:33, 10 August 2005 70.150.37.32

This option would do exactly this: hide from the history page, any edits made using the rollback button that admins have, and the edit that was reverted by it. Hopefully this wouldn't be spoofable by vandals marking their edits as minor and putting in there edit summary "Reverted edits by [anon ip] to last version by [username]". Are rollback edits marked in any special way so vandals cannot spoof it? Of course, reverts by non-admin users would still show though.

Also, in the process, it would also not alert articles on your watchlist. The watchlist pulls the most recent edit, and it would only put it at the top if you open your watchlist before it was reverted by an admin. Of course you could still use the diff and old version links since it is only hiding it, not deleting it.

I think this would also discourage vandals since their 30 seconds of fame wont be seen by as many people.

What do you think of this proposal? --pile0nades^{talk | contribs} 09:03, 10 August 2005 (UTC)

A better way to detect reversions: if two consecutive edits have no net effect, i.e. if there is no difference between the versions before and after them, show neither. This shouldn't be too hard to fit in the code, and problems with the processing power needed to detect this could be fixed by marking edits as reverts when the edits are made instead of when the history is pulled up. Of course, that would necessitate adding a new field to the database... ~~ N (t/c) 09:29, 10 August 2005 (UTC)

I assume "them" refers to the edit being reverted, and "neither" to this and the reverting edit? If so, that could work. But then, couldn't a vandal just revert back to a vandalized version and it not show, and people may miss it? --pile0nades^{talk | contribs} 10:01, 10 August 2005 (UTC)

No, if they did something like:

vandalize
vandalize again
revert to version after edit #1

then it would show edit #1. The real problem, I just realized, is that this would make it hard to detect 3RR violations if people forgot to turn it off. ~~ N (t/c) 10:26, 10 August 2005 (UTC)

OK, I get it. The only thing a vandal could hide is a reversion of his own vandalism! --pile0nades^{talk | contribs} 10:46, 10 August 2005 (UTC)

I don't think that it would be at all appropriate for the history to hide reversions by non-admins. This would hide a great deal of edit warring, and any vandal would be able to revert any edit back to a previous version and have that earlier edit not show up on watch pages or the like.

I can see that it would be beneficial to have such a system for uses of the roll-back button, however, which admins are expected to use only in the cases of vandalism, and not edit warring. This, I think, would be fine so long as

There were a simple button at the top of the history which allows you to see all edits, including reversions,
There were some kind of flagging that reversions had been hidden, for instance making the following edit show

# (cur) (last) 01:33, 10 August 2005 Jimbo Wales m (spelling correction) [some earlier edits hidden]

or something along those lines. Beyond those three points, I think this would be a good idea. — Asbestos | Talk (RFC) 14:34, 10 August 2005 (UTC)

Stable contents (WebDSign)

according to a Yahoo newsline dated (20050805) J. Wales said "There may soon be so-called stable contents. In this case, we'd freeze the pages whose quality is undisputed" (note added 20050810: it appears that J. Wales never said that)

a motion follows. this boils down to a proposal for modification of the Wikipedia's underlying Mediawiki software but I'm pretty sure that the idea can be consideraly enhanced on the Wikipedia side, therefore I submit it here, hoping that interested parties will share their thoughts.

Objectives

our objectives are:

avoid annoying anyone who likes the way Wikipedia works now
give to anyone who prefers reviewed articles to obtain it

the proposed method:

offers to any vsitor a way to trust or express his opinions (I like, I agree, I disagree...) about an article content

eases automatic discovery of favorites topics and opinions shared by coherent groups of Web users (it may lead to some Collaborative_filtering),

eases automatic (done by software crawling on the Web) and qualified (with conditions, for example "count only certifications made by people identified by this authority") measure of people agreement.

Approach

in order to do so each Wikipedia article may have more than one status:

'raw', meaning 'last standard content' (any existing article has this 'raw' status)

'unpolluted', meaning 'free from any vandalism'

'validated', meaning that 'a Wikipedia commission of people knowing the field validated it'

'expertised', meaning that 'a world-known expert of the field checked it ok'

any Wikimedia visitor will be able to state in his profile that, upon reading, [s]he wants to obtain the last version of any article which reached a given status. if there is no such checked version the immediate 'lower' status will be published (this is recursive)

this will not in any way annoy the reader who does not care about all those darn article status :-) because the personal profile (preferences) of each registered user will state 'raw' by default and (for registered and anonymous visitors) upon each article display a new tab will offer access to the various other 'statused' version when such versions exists

those various articles status will be expressed by cryptographic seals. it is not mandatory as most functions proposed here can be implemented using standard version-tracking tricks (taging, branching...) but some people may want to have their screwed articles published with a forged status and try to tamper the servers or network connection. let's integrate security concerns as soon as possible the [WebDSign protocol] may be the technical foundation of such seals.

Usage

all the processes (requesting-delivering-managing certificates, sealing, obtaining information about a seal...) will be done using a Web navigator.

in order to produce a seal one needs a digital certificate (X.509 or OpenPGP (PGP-GPG)), delivered (X.509) or signed (PGP) by a Certification_Authority (CA), which will be Wikipedia organization. anyone can check that a given certificate (and all informations it stores) was issued by a given CA.

any Wikipedia contributor will carry only one Wikipedia certificate, which will store many attributes stating various useful parameters. it is just like the usual username-password pair.

Giving the 'unpolluted' status

any administrator will obtain a certificate in order to let him/her give the status 'unpolluted' to any article.

Giving the 'validated' status

using the existing set of articles an automagic analysis of the volume of informations produced and its relative stability ('unpolluted' status, age and amount of readers) can establish a 'confidence score' for each author. the administrators will use those scores and deliver certificates to the best authors. those certificates will be qualified by an attribute (named 'wpexpert') listing the name of the categories of expertise of their carrier (themes, for example 'mathematics' or 'geography').

Giving the 'expertised' status

in each category this first college of 'wpexperts' will be enabled to form a college in order to elect world-known 'experts' of the field. the CA will produce certificates for them, with an 'expert' attribute storing the pertinent categories names. at first they may be not very interested in participatinf but as more and more will somewhat do emulation will raise their involvement

Scores, votes...

moreover any registered Wikipedia user may have a certificate in order to express that he agrees/likes (or disagrees/dislikes) some chunk of information in an article.

Subramanian kindly pointed to me that User:Sam_Spade/Policy_Proposals is pertinent. it leads to a huge number of interesting ideas, especially meta:Article_validation_proposals, which may be helped or help this proposal.

thoughts and comments

Now for the votes and opinions:

supported, requires discussion - I heartly agree that something like this is needed. I suggest that only two levels are used, validated and expertised: let´s keep it simple. Both would have their new contributions first added to the talk page, then either incorporated or discarded according to consensus. Also, please note that any stable status is to be dropped when an unexpected ongoing event happens to the subject of an article. - Subramanian ^talk 21:17, 9 August 2005 (UTC)

two levels only: I think that there is a need for 'unpolluted' but may be wrong. this approach tolerates adding or removing a status.

yes, as soon as an expert of the category does it (those experts, as such, are probably following the trends in their categories) Natmaka 11:36, 10 August 2005 (UTC)

Cough. You are aware that Reuters (the actual source of the article) got it wrong? -- Cyrius|✎ 23:02, 9 August 2005 (UTC)

note added in the proposal Natmaka 11:36, 10 August 2005 (UTC)

Well, I confess I was aware of the misunderstanding. But the discussion this guy proposes is still useful. :) Subramanian ^talk

Shh, I was waiting to see how far they went with it! --Golbez 23:05, August 9, 2005 (UTC)

Could be the "soon" specified bit more? Is the SW already developed or is it in design phase? Pavel Vozenilek 00:58, 10 August 2005 (UTC)

as far as I know the code is in beta stage in Mediawiki 1.5 Natmaka 11:36, 10 August 2005 (UTC)

Prevent users from being blocked along with their IPs

Just now I found I was blocked from editing. Gah. The first time it happened I had to sit it out, but this time around I have my amazing wiki-moulding powers so was able to unblock myself, largely for the point of making this post.

Many users, unfortunately including myself, are stuck with crappy ISPs, but the average user isn't going to want to sit through three-hour phone conversations with clueless 20-something brunettes finally ending with some sort of "three months free access" cop-out, rather than an expensive hardware upgrade. So maybe WE should do something.

I think there needs to be some sort of logged-in protection. So if you're a logged-in user you are OK, even if your logged-out IP just got blocked.

Alternately, if that allows people to log out and vandalise then log in and continue editing innocently, maybe have it for admins only since they're so "trustworthy".

Or something. Anyway, see what you think. Feel free to add fertiliser or weedkiller to this sprouting idea. :) Garrett^Talk 13:23, 8 August 2005 (UTC)

gkhan picks up a spraycan and starts spraying it all over Garret. He is promtly blocked.

Yes, this is a pickle isn't it. I don't like your idea because, as you say, it's painfully easy to circumvent it. I think that when this happends, a user should send an email to the blocking admin (or a nice, friendly admin that you are close with :P) explaining the sitution. I doubt they'd refuse to unblock. Failing that, the mailing list. It's one of those things that are a pain in the ass but you have to deal with. Good users shouldn't be blocked, but bad ones should be. Ahh, it's a dilemma alright :P gkhan 13:40, August 8, 2005 (UTC)

See bug #550. Bovlb 16:08:32, 2005-08-08 (UTC)

After my recent move, I was using dial-up for a while before I got broadband here, and there were several times found myself hit by an anonymous user block (and it is quite annoying, let me tell you). Of course, as an administrator, I could unblock the IP address (of course promptly reporting my actions on WP:AN/I). Nevertheless, that option is not available to most Wikipedia editors. It would be nice if IP blocks didn't affect logged-in users, but then of course vandals could just keep creating new accounts. What about allowing logged-in users to edit despite an IP block, provided their account was created prior to the block? The problem is I assume this would be quite difficult to implement in the software. Also, it doesn't address the problem of someone logging out, vandalizing, then logging back in. Do you think this happens often? I always assumed that most vandals were random Internet visitors, not registered Wikipedia editors who logged out to vandalize, then resumed their double life. — Knowledge Seeker দ 03:20, August 9, 2005 (UTC)

Can the software not recognize if your username is currently browsing or editing the site? Any users who are currently logged in during an act of vandalism couldn't (as far as I can see) also be committing vandalism with an anonymous IP, and so shouldn't be blocked. Of course, this would require that the blocking admin point out to the system the specific time-stamps of the vandalism. This wouldn't help those who are not logged in during the vandalism, but I've been blocked myself while on Wikipedia for an incedent that occured as I was logged in, and it seemed a little silly at the time. — Asbestos | Talk (RFC) 10:01, 9 August 2005 (UTC)

Currently, if an IP is blocked, so is any user editing via that IP. I have suggested that there should be three levels of block: 1) anon-IP blocks. These would affect an anon user editing via a particualr IP (or range) but would have no effect on a user who is logged in. 2) User blocks. These would affect a particualr user name, no matter what IP is in use. 3) anti-sockpupet blocks. Thesw ould afect a perticular IP no matter what user is using that IP, anon or logged in, just like the current IP blocks do. This typ would normally be sued ONLY when ther is reason to suspect that a user is evading a user block by changing user names or by editing without logging in. This should not be a technically hard change, but a feature change would be needed. DES ^(talk) 16:35, 9 August 2005 (UTC)

I believe this discussion should be moved to Wikipedia:Village pump (perennial proposals). --cesarb 18:10, 9 August 2005 (UTC)

A new Word Game

I don't know where to look for someone or a company who would be interested in a word game that I'm developing that is fun for adults and could also be used as a good tool for teaching and promoting kids on how to form the basics of sentences and using wrods in the proper context. Does any one know what would be the best way to present this to a board game manufacturer for consideration? Frank Eggleston

Are you proposing that WIkipedia be involved in this somehow? If not, I suggest you ask your question at the Reference Desk, where you'll get more response. Cheers, Bovlb 16:21:56, 2005-08-08 (UTC)

Let's finally SOLVE the Macedonia issue...

Please visit the following link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Macedonia#Let.27s_finally_SOLVE_this_issue...

I sterbinski 13:14, 8 August 2005 (UTC)

Trollworld - A parallel Wikipedia universe

I propose after identifying any chronic vandal, we should turn a switch, and that user will be cookied into a parallel version of Wikipedia almost indistinguishable from the real Wikipedia. There will be no indication of banishment for the user. He can vandalize to his content, unresponded to, so that he can admire his "victory". The theory goes that trolls need an audience that interacts with their behavior. Remove all response and this troll will become dejected and forget the hobby. It's also a very funny joke for us to play on vile brats.

To make this simple, the front page, current events, etc. will disappear. The landing page of Trollworld will be a Google like simple search page. The header will announce the new rebranded sleek Wikipedia. I don't expect the typical malicious vandal, a 15 year old pothead, to catch on. lots of issues | leave me a message 01:23, 8 August 2005 (UTC)

Hilarious idea. -- Cyrius|✎ 01:54, 8 August 2005 (UTC)

Love it. Trollworld 2.0 would incorporate RC-patrol 'bots, which would randomly revert edits and drop

Hello, I'm [[User:{{subst:REVISIONUSER}}|{{subst:REVISIONUSER}}]]. An edit that you recently made seemed to be a test and has been reverted. If you want to practice editing, please use the sandbox. If you think I made a mistake, or if you have any questions, you can leave me a message on [[User talk:{{subst:REVISIONUSER}}|my talk page]]. Thanks! templates on the troll's talk pages. FreplySpang (talk) 02:01, August 8, 2005 (UTC)

Shhhh! Don't let them catch on! :-) Hilarious idea, and unfortunately probably not possible. - Omegatron 02:05, August 8, 2005 (UTC)

DO IT! DO IT! DO IT! ~~ N (t/c) 06:08, 8 August 2005 (UTC)

Let's archive this into perennial proposals - as the last one on the page. :) r3m0t ^talk 06:59, August 8, 2005 (UTC)

Hey, that's cheating! :-) JRM · Talk 08:09, 8 August 2005 (UTC)

Actor Filmographies

Looking for comments on a new way to present filmographies in actor articles for improved consistency, less IMDb thievery, etc. I put together a test in my userspace and I'm looking for opinions before rolling it into any articles. Thanks! RADICALBENDER ★ 21:02, August 7, 2005 (UTC)

I think it is far too large and complicated, simple is always better. I prefer the regular list because it is less distracting and takes up less space, however I do like what is done in Henry Fonda filmography, but I would only use the Henry Fonda list style if the list of films was a seperate article. MechBrowman 02:58, August 9, 2005 (UTC)

Trimming the fat from the welcome template

The {{welcome}} template is the very first thing many users see. Unfortunately, recently it has been growing out of proportions, as some people think that answers to any possible question a newbie might have must be covered in the template. This has lead to a huge welcome page, a screenful on my computer, and it happened at least several times that new users just deleted or moved the welcome template I put on their talk page.

I suggest removing some of the links from there, which are covered in the help pages anyway, and just make a prominent link to the help page. Also, I believe is an overkill to tell the newbies about the Wikipedia:Topical index (who the heck reads that one).

My trimmed version of the welcome template is available at Template:Welcome/Proposed version 1. Again, it is the original with some links cut out. I wonder what people think. Oleg Alexandrov 20:08, 6 August 2005 (UTC)