Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)

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Move to republicanism?

Seeing as how we're way beyond the threshold of Dunbar's number here on en.wikipedia (as was recently pointed out to me), is it time to think about some formal governmental structure here? I'll freely admit that, as a self-admitted libertarian (and, in Wikipedia terms, an inclusionist) this is at least partially admitting to an ideological failure, but after a recent experience I think I can starkly see the issue in relief.

In my opinion a huge issue here is actually fairly simple. Wikipedia is, somewhat by design (technologically), anti-social. We're actually encouraged not to interact on site, which creates a natural disjunction between all of us. The fact is though, that there are enough of us here that regardless of the social mechanisms that could be available to us that we would never be able to agree to the level of "consensus" on most issues. That's great for those who hold conservative positions on issues, but anyone who wants any change (meaning you) is likely to receive resistance... which is really anathema to the current consensus based system. When the loudest minority can prevent any changes, who is actually helped?

So, after thinking on this long and hard, I've come to the conclusion that the best course of action is... to discuss this with what community actually exists here on Wikipedia. What do you think? Should we elect individuals to actual positions of power, in some manner? (actually, we already do with ArbCom, so should that be extended somehow?)
— V = I * R (talk to Ω) 10:46, 1 October 2009 (UTC)

Yeah, we should have structures for making the important decisions (i.e. on content and best practices), rather than the pointless structure that ArbCom has become (basically the Wikipedia drama club). Of course we do need to deal with bad behaviour, but that needs to be done on sight, quickly and effectively. When I say structures for making the important decisions, I don't mean people to make the decisions for us, but people to help the process along, judge what the results are and ensure they get implemented. --Kotniski (talk) 11:28, 1 October 2009 (UTC)

The problem is not only one of scale, but of time. No one but fanatics has the time and patience to read or grasp, let alone participate in every important decision, which means that something like the Manual of Style, the Village Pump or the public sections of Administrators' Noticeboard, while open to all, in practice can't accommodate more than a few dozen people (if that) at any one time. I don't know about executive authority, but since I tend towards the pluralist, libertarian, inclusionist, anti-prescriptivist, hundred-flowers view of Wikipedia, and away from other common views here, I think it might be healthy to develop very loose political parties and allow them to campaign when those elections come up. I was eligible to vote this year for (I think) Wikipedia's board, but couldn't summon the will to plough through twenty candidates' statements and Q&A. I could be more active in the various associations, or start my own, but until they can organize as more than volunteer fire brigades to either Rescue Worthy Articles or Stamp Out Creeping Cruft on a case-by-case by case basis ["Help! Help! My Favorite Band's trapped in AfD; won't someone please, please rescue them?" "Don't worry, little lady, the Association of Inclusionist Wikipedians will rally round to save the day! (without, of course, violating the Ban on Canvassing)"] and articulate a fairly-full programme, I can't see them as a democratically-workable conduit between ordinary editors (or readers) and the baroque workings of the Project. No one likes seeing a single article's Talk Page or open Requests for Comment artificially packed, but there has to be some way, without breaching that essential aim of the Ban on Canvassing, to let people know that Party X feels this way about this issue or that slate of candidates, while Party Y feels very differently, and here are the reasons why. And with a self-organized project like Wikipedia, I tend (from personal experience with vaguely-similar groups) to believe more in Robert Michels' iron law of oligarchy and Parkinson's Law than in the anti-party sentiments of Rousseau, Federalist No. 10 or Washington's Farewell Address. —— Shakescene (talk) 07:42, 2 October 2009 (UTC)

Well said, that pretty much sums up my own views nicely. Your central point, regarding lack of time, is really what gives me pause as well. I think that a large part of the issue here is that everyone is more used to a smaller, more tight-knit group. Usually most forums, web cites, games, etc... have a better defined central goal to them, which makes it easier for everyone to get along since most people will be there for whatever the "it" is. Wikipedia obviously has a much broader scope, and a much more political issue base as well, then basically any other internet site/project. So... I don't know. The ad hoc development of the Wikipedia community continues to more or less work as it has for the last 7-8 years, and nothing is likely to stop it (I'm not at all a doomsayer, or some sort of angry conspiracy type). There has to be something to make it better though, and with a group that is (and should be) as diverse as Wikipedia's I'm simply left wondering if some sort of Republican system would be a good solution.

Just trying to brainstorm a little bit here, but ...maybe we could put an individual or small group in charge of what can be an RFC/centralized discussion, and somehow formalize that process more?
— V = I * R (talk to Ω) 08:59, 2 October 2009 (UTC)

Can you explain what you mean by Republican? You mean something like an elected parliament or congress, that would take decisions by formal vote-count if it's not clear what the position of the "community" is on some matter?--Kotniski (talk) 09:37, 2 October 2009 (UTC)

Yes, more or less... although as I said above the ideas here are extremely nebulous even in my head. I guess "representative government" would probably be more accurate.
— V = I * R (talk to Ω) 20:18, 2 October 2009 (UTC)

Um, there are so many on-and-off users, one-time users, IP addresses, users who dont come on more than once a week, etc that "representative government" would quickly become "representative of the users who come on several times a day". I think that would be very detrimental to those other groups, especially IP addresses and newbies, who already get treated as second-class citizens and proposals are constantly put forth at the Village Pump (two that I know of in the last two weeks) regarding limiting their ability to participate and make it harder to sign up to Wikipedia. The "fanatics" would have more control over any type of "government" as they would be more likely to vote. While it is correct that many, regarding the US constitutional set-up deplored and railed against the potential of "factions" and "parties", the very way in which the US Constitution was written meant that if parties had not formed the US Constitution would not have functioned at all, which some believe was the actual purpose of the Founders (to have a Federal Govt that didnt work and therefore couldnt mess with the states or people). The same, if we werent smarter than the Founders (and actually we are smarter), would happen here. Parties would not be good for Wikipedia, but if we were to set-up a "governing body" we'd probably have to have them in order to function. "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for every other form of government tried by Man"- Winston Churchill. There would be those "conservatives" who believe the letter of the "law" should be strictly interpretted and all policies and guidelines would be enforced to the letter and IAR, commonsense, and consensus would be thrown out. There would be "progressives" who stress IAR, common sense, and hold policy as more loosely as a "this is what you should do idealy, but if you want to tweak it in a different case, go ahead". Those two positions I can see as easily rallying two groups from the get-go. Heaven help us all if that first group were to win. I'd spend every dime I have on a new competitor to Wikipedia if they ever did.Camelbinky (talk) 00:33, 6 October 2009 (UTC)

Multiple issues

I think you actually have about three issues wrapped together here. At the top, well, I don't know about Dunbar's number; Brook's The Mythical Man-Month#The Mythical Man-Month would seem more applicable here. (Basically, an unstructured group of N people has N*N ways to communicate; as the group gets bigger communication becomes infeasible. This is implictly why "town-hall democracy" doesn't work at large scales – no one has the time to study all the issues.) But the solution to this is well-known: structure. Which, I hasten to add, need not be authoritarian and heirarchial. E.g., if a large group arranges itself as a collection of smaller groups (presumably the smaller groups have charge of or authority for certain areas or tasks), then only the smaller group needs to cross-communicate on the group's task, and the inter-group communications are simpler because because only a single channel is needed to each group. (Presumably the group has a spokesman or manager or some such external representor.) This should not seem novel, as it is pretty much how things are now on Wikipedia (though very informally).

The second issue stems from the inherent chaos of the idealistic "let everyone/anyone edit". I think we have plenty of evidence that not everyone is pointed in the same direction. Reality is more like a talented two-year old trying to stack some blocks while the rest of the kids run around, constantly knocking down his work. "Let everyone edit" arrays a lot of seeming randomness against any effort to order or structure anything. I don't think it is "anti-social" to resist this tyranny of the lowest common denominator of behavior (or goals). Sociality is the whole matter of how live in groups, which here transforms into the question of how to conserve the result of our efforts from the depradations of others. (In that sense I am all for "conservatism".) This leads to standards (e.g., references), the watchlist function, vandalism patrols, etc. For sure, this amounts to resistance to change. But consider the analogy of an electrical circuit (how appropriate!): certainly won't work without conductance, but also won't work without insulation. (Unless you want a big flash of self-destruction.)

The third issue, of how to organize the group, which includes the implicit sub-issue of how to govern the group, is thus driven by the need to conserve our efforts (else why bother?) and to organize generally, and constrained by the effective impossibility of doing this through simple, universal consensus. Which then gets deep....  :-)

I hope that helps to clarify matters. - J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 22:34, 12 October 2009 (UTC)

Why should the choice of government be driven by "the need to conserve our efforts"? After all wikipedia is a collaborative encyclopedia, so I would think it's main focus would be on facilitating collaboration, encouraging people to improve each others contributions.

Of course maintenance of wikipedia is essential to guaranty the quality of its content, but restricting edits is not the only way to achieve that goal. And it should not in any case become the main focus of wikipedia, it would be like transforming a mean into an end.

...

This has probably already been discussed a lot so I'll stop here, but I guess we're already seeing the 2 parties Camelbinky talked about ;-) -- Ryk V (talk) 01:34, 19 October 2009 (UTC)

The conservation (or retention?) of effort means our results have some kind of endurance. (Why even bother if our efforts have no persisting result? Aside, that is, from some kind of performance art.) I once saw a group that had to repeatedly re-visit and re-decide a certain question because they were not able to retain/conserve their collective decisions. It is not at all a matter of artificial restrictions (as distinct from "liberty!" in the Hobbesian sense) on the means controlling the ends; it is a matter of arranging the means in order to attain (and conserve) the ends. - J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 20:28, 31 October 2009 (UTC)

Decision making

Going back to the main issue which is, as I understand it : how to improve the decision making process on wikipedia, seeing as the current one, based on simple consensus, leads to immobility.

The initial proposition was to elect a governing body by, for example, expanding on the idea of the Arbitration Committee. I actually think that the wmf:Board of Trustees (at least the part interested in wikipedia) would be a more fitting starting point : unlike ArbCom which mainly arbitrates disputes the board is already the closest thing wikipedia has to a governing body.

Another existing project that could address part of the issue under discussion is the Wikimedia Strategic Planning. This is not a republican system as anyone who wants (and has the time and motivation) can participate. It is also designed to avoid the immobility seen on wikipedia by organizing participants into focused task-forces (obviously under the Dunbar's number threshold :-) that will assemble as much data as possible on their respective subject before discussing possible improvements. This process should allow them to avoid the kind of unresearched discussions sometime found on this page where each side gives its opinion without supporting it with verifiable data and without trying to address the other side argumentation, thus leading to no consensus.

Contrary to what is implied on m:Strategic planning 2009, this project should evolve into a continuous improvement process. However, it remains to be seen how the decision about each proposed change will be taken (if someone know, please explain) : a vote or maybe a less formal submission to the community with all the adequate research and argumentation ... -- Ryk V (talk) 03:19, 19 October 2009 (UTC)

I'm sorry to be late here. Wish I'd have seen this earlier. I agree with the proposer -- the whole consensus thing is getting to be almost arbitrary. Appropriate results are never insured because there are so many people with so equal a say and so little structure. There's a reason large organizations need structure, and I'm not sure how Wikipedia is any different. I used to believe in the ideals, being as the proposer is, on the liberal side of things, but lately I've been losing confidence in this having the ability to remain a fair and effective system that actually produces results in the encyclopedia's best interests, and those of the editors.

I posted a rudimentary administrative hierarchy proposal at Strategy Wiki a while ago, if anyone is interested. Equazcion (talk) 16:56, 24 October 2009 (UTC)

Equazcion, you already know my view on Wikipedia and my dislike of any class structure so I'm sure you can guess that I must now take an opposing view on your hierachy system. Yes, a loud, tenacious minority can and often does prevent good changes (as you and I know all too well); but is the solution to that really to create a hierachy and more bureaucracy? A bureaucracy's first and foremost priority is to protect its "turf", once we create one it will protect whatever rights and abilities we give it and we'll never be able to destroy it, control it, or reign it in, it will appropriate new abilities it sees fit in order to do its job, whether we originally thought it should have those abilities or explicitely thought it should not, if it needs them for its job it will give it to itself. Arbcom was a mistake in my opinion and still is. We dont need more levels with more fancy titles and more rules and more bureaucracy that has nothing better to do than create more rules and enforcement, and editors out there thinking a fancy title gives their opinions more say (we see that problem with certain admins, and think about how hard it is to strip an admin compared to giving the title!). This is an encyclopedia, isnt our job to create and edit articles, this isnt an experiment in nation-building; I wait for the day when someone proposes a Wikipedia national anthem and flag.Camelbinky (talk) 00:37, 4 November 2009 (UTC)

Perennial proposal

Perennial proposal. Activitiy on any single page tends to have rather less participants than Dunbar's number. Another way to put that: A wiki has its own structure. This is an interesting enough phenomenon that you could almost call a wiki a novel kind of political system all by itself. Yes yes, I said Almost. ;-)

Most "Real World" political systems have already been proven to fail on-line, because -hey- on-line is a different environment.

Wikis work better than most. I think the current community and system wikipedia uses is pretty much on its way to break the world record for longest-lived online community. (It has already broken the record for largest, AFAIK).

If you want to (re-)introduce concepts that have already been proven not to work, or that work contrary to what you can do on a wiki? No thanks!

On the other hand, would you like to design something that's actually better? I'm all ears!

Just realize that we already have something of a system, and that system still sort of works (however badly), which is a huge accomplishment by itself. Try to figure why the system works, and use that to build on. Don't blindly grab random system X you read about in a schoolbook yesterday. ;-)

• Existing System X probably won't magically transform the wiki into something useful. That's because most existing systems are not designed for online communities, let alone wiki-communities. I'm not saying it's not possible, but it's unlikely.
• In fact, just blindly implementing any philosophy or paradigm has never really worked out too well anywhere or anytime in history. Don't start a cargo cult, Make sure you Know What You're Doing.
• Several traditional systems can lead to rapid death of a community (see even just work by Alvin Toffler for predictions and reasoning on this)
• Anything that will actually work is therefore likely to be either esoteric, custom designed, or both.
• What I said above: wikis are interesting. An empty wiki already has quite some elements of a successful political system. You can create projects rapidly and cross-link them. If people participate in the projects, you have a running system. Wikis are just at fast at politics as at writing encyclopedias. ;-) The trick is to get people to actually participate.
• I'm not married to wikis, (dangit, I demonstrated mediawikiwave at wikimania!). Other paradigms exist. Investigate them!
• Never underestimate the power or utility of a good programmer in an online community.

--Kim Bruning (talk) 04:51, 4 November 2009 (UTC) I tend to get a little worried when a self-professed-republican tries to call me 'conservative'. On the other hand, maybe I'm not the one to be worried <innocent look>

If anyone else, like me, is seriously (or even not seriously) worried about any move to a representative body that would create, maintain, enforce, and hand down policies and judgements for us, thereby taking that right from the Community at-large I have created a page here where we can show support for the basic ideals of Wikipedia that are most likely to be attacked by such a move. Even if such a republican form is never adopted it will still be of good use in giving a forum for those that agree with things like IAR, consensus, wp:notstatute, and common sense. It is a liberal view of Wikipedia as a place where all are equal editors with equal say and opposed to hierarchies or more bureaucracy.Camelbinky (talk) 23:14, 4 November 2009 (UTC)

I think there is a distinct sub-issue here, which really warrants a separate discussion. And I wish I had more time to get into this, but for a quicky overview: Are all editors – and implicitly, all editing – really equal? There is a certain sense or aspect where I think this should be the case (and this really needs to explicated), but in other respects (such as quality, depth, "tone", etc.) it is clear and obvious that editors and editing are not "equal". The connection with the separate issue(s?) of hierarchies/bureauracy/authoritarianism is that solutions for dealing with the first issue are being sought in the realm of the latter, but this need not be the case. In summary: I think (yeah, on a good day) that we need to better refine just what "equality" means, and to work up better (more nuanced?) possible solutions to some of the problems. In particular, I think the idealistic "everyone's equal, every edit is good" view needs some realistic reconsideration, but that does not mean submission to some kind of overlord. - J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 23:12, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

Back

Interesting. I took a bit of a break from Wikipedia, but this topic is still here. It's funny how almost random, seemingly inconsequential thoughts can sometimes turn out to be more substantial then the more normal Village Pump topics, isn't it?

Anyway, there's some good thoughts here, and their still percolating in my own thoughts. I think that it's important to point out that I personally don't think that anything drastic needs to change with Wikipedia. One of the things that I did during my "wikibreak" is to look around at the off-site Wikipedia related forums. My sense is that there is a tendency for those who have been "jilted" by what passes for the Wikipedia community to immediately jump to attack the site. I understand the reaction, but at the same time it's not constructive at all in my opinion.

What strikes me at being the most problematic aspect of Wikipedia's "governance" is that there effectively isn't any. Currently, Wikipedia is essentially an Anarchist state, and it seems to be more so now then it was in the not to distant past. My (possibly, or even probably incorrect) personal perception is that "Jimbo" is less active now, but that he has acted as the single Wikipedia "Moderator at large" (for want of a better title) for several years. It seems to be appropriate for him to move on, or move away, for various reasons which I'm certain that many others are more familiar with then myself. However, that leaves all of us in something of an in-between period, and personally I'd rather see what I perceive as an ongoing transition be actively managed by us as a community rather then simply bearing through it in an ad-hoc manner, hoping for the best.

As I sort of said in the opening post to this thread, I personally tend to hold onto Libertarian ideals. That being the case, I would love to see Wikipedia uphold as much of it's current "do what you think is right" attitude as possible. However, my Libertarian views are decidedly colored by a desire for structure, order, or (gasp) lawfulness. Chaos tends to bother me personally, and ultimately I think that rampant chaos is what is currently harming the Wikipedia project the most.

As should be clear from my replies above, I don't have any clear answers myself. Since this topic has continued on for a while at least, I do think that it could be constructuve for more of us to comment here however. Thanks for reading!
— V = I * R (talk to Ω) 04:41, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

"Chaos" is a bit ambiguous, but in the sense of "entropy" – yes, in whatever we do, it is usually because we want something better than would be produced by merely random or chaotic processes. Which generally requires structure, etc. - J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 22:52, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

democracy is bad?

I was just now reading through (you might say "dredging through"...) most of the commetary at Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Arbitration Committee 2. What struck me, in relation to this topic and that discussion, is the seemingly dogmatic and ideological position offered by many that essentially boils down to "democracy is bad". I recognize that I'm risking the start of an ideological political battle here, but I find that I'm almost compelled to continue. Let's start with this question: Is the "democracy is bad" viewpoint really something that has become dogmatic here on Wikipedia?
— V = I * R (talk to Ω) 12:19, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

Yes, let us step carefully. The specific and literal question you are asking is whether a certain viewpoint "has become dogmatic". Which I don't know, but I would say that is the wrong question. To see the real issue we need to back up one step and look closer at just what this viewpoint is. Particularly, the viewpoint (of many of us, including myself) generally (but imperfectly!) formulated as "editing should be restricted" (see discussion below at #Edits by anonymous users), and even my questioning (above) of the idealistic "everyone's equal, every edit is good", does NOT equate to "democracy is bad". This may require some careful distangling.

Note that the two views "everyone should be able to edit" and "editing should be restricted" are not necessarily incompatible. It depends on the nature of the restriction. These are analogous to "everyone can come into my house" and "no one can come in by the back door". (Because I don't have one!!) No problem, because "everyone" have the option of using the front door. Same way with editing: does "everyone should be able edit" mean "everybody should be able to edit anonymously"? Well, golly, is that a requirement, or not? It wasn't specified, and whether one implicitly assumes it, or not, leads to different results.

Similarly with the assumption that "everybody should be able to edit" is the same as "democracy". The latter certainly incorporates the idea of "everybody" (as in universal participation), but while the former might be deemed democratic (because it is like democracy), I think it is a profound error to conflate the two contexts. E.g., just because I live in a democracy doesn't mean that a bus driver has to let me drive. Well, I've run out of time, so here's long shot to beat the buzzer: taking this back to the top, I would say that some of the concerns about "republicanism" involve similar misperceptions as to the nature of democray. But that's for another day. - J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 00:19, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

As someone who's degree is in poli sci and is a grad student in poli sci with comparative politics as my discipline I most definitely do know what democracy is and how it works. On this I am most definitely an expert and know more than the average person/Wikipedian. I have got to say I dont quite understand the bus driver analogy, as "freedom of ability to do something" does not equal "democracy", the bus driver doesnt have to let you drive the bus because he's the bus driver, in the purest democracy a bus driver still doesnt have any obligation to let you drive unless you are saying the bus itself has been declared a democracy, in which case yes the bus driver does have to let you drive if the bus took a vote and the winner was you. The way Wikipedia is today is closest to pure communism than to "democracy", if people seem to have problem wrapping around that I can explain on an essay if you wish. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Camelbinky (talk • contribs) 01:36, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

So my analogy wasn't the best. Let's try a different one: airplane pilots. Not every is a "Sully"; do you want just anyone having a turn up front? No. This why piloting is restricted to those with the training, etc. Is this undemocratic? I would say no, because the context of democracy is political, and whereas expert competency in technical matters is not political. (Or shouldn't be.) To take this back to the issue that was raised, I would say that it is not so much a matter of whether democracy per se is "bad", but whether the application of certain democratic concepts is valid in a given context. E.g., democracy applied in a cockpit is bad, but that is not the same as "democracy is bad". (And if I can squeeze in a few more minutes, a further comment in the next subsection.) - J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 00:39, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

Fears

What I am scared of in any move towards an elected body is that the elected body will be given x "powers" and "responsibilities" regarding our policies/guidelines. Factions/parties will form around specific core ideologies here on Wikipedia and an ideology that is currently a minority view may end up being carried by the majority on the elected body. Secondly- it is a fact that any representative body/bureaucracy (whether a legislature or a just a department within a government) will always take on powers and authorities beyond that given to it even if those powers were originally explicitely left out on purpose, if that body believes that those powers are absolutely necessary to fulfill its given function (as interpreted by the body itself). It is the "law of bureaucracies" and is the fundamental fact needed in order to understand how bureaucracies work, the most common example given is that the US Constitution in no way provides for the [U.s.] Supreme Court to have the ability to declare laws unconstitutional (or presidential acts), Marbury v Madison was a ruling by the Supreme that gave itself that power. We should all be aware of true bureaucracies and political structures before we attempt to construct one of our own. And of course- Wikipedia is an exercise in creating an encyclopedia, not an exercise in creating a better bureaucracy or "proto-state".Camelbinky (talk) 01:36, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

The whole point of "creating a better bureaucracy" is to better manage the encyclopedia making. There is a widespread attitude that "bureaucracies are bad", therefore we should have no "bureaucracy". And by implication no management, no leadership, no anything by which the limitations of small groups can be transcended.

I think the reason for this attitude is just as you stated: fears. I suspect that at the bottom of the pile of fears is the particular one that someone else will interfere with what I want to do. Well, what if the ability to control certain aspects of one's environment ("power") were parcelled out so that you get to have exclusive control over there, and I get to have exclusive control here? (Like how it works out regarding property.) That is, decentralization. Which is not to say that different little entities are not trying to take on more power, but in being dispersed they are less powerful. (Just like the free market model.) My point is that though there are many possibilities of which we ought to be scared of, there are many other possibilities. And we should not let fears of some prevent us from considering others. - J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 01:04, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

Very good points JJ, that definitely got me to thinking. It is true that what I am afraid of is can, perhaps, be summed up as "fear of the unknown". I like your analogy regarding property, but remember if we have a bureaucracy (or proto-state as some of these proposals seem), yes, we may end up having "me control this" and "you control that" but at least in the US remember there are zoning regulations, fence height regulation, property taxes, and etc (to continue your analogy's theme); perhaps some of these bureaucratic/"legislative"/"republicanism" ideas, if not well-thought out and properly vetted could end up costing us some freedoms we currently hold dear on our "little plots of land". To end my post on the analogy note- remember it wasnt that long ago that zoning regulations by local governments were considered unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court, now pretty much every municipality has zoning or at least some form of regulation, so in Wikipedia things we currently think "oh, that would never be made a policy" or "that would never be taken out of policy" may one day be taken out or added against the majority opinion because our "elected body" deems it in "our best interest".Camelbinky (talk) 00:09, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

This closes in on the fundamental philosophical issue (and fear): that some entity might diminish my ability ("freedom") to do what I think is best, might impose on me in some way. The problem is the difficulty in having a say in every issue and at every point where we might perceive an interest. This is why in every sphere of society we necessarily delegate (or at least defer) to others: to "bureaucrats" in exective matters, to "representative government" in political matters, to various experts in other matters. Basically, we learn that we can't control or even influence everything, so we sort out and focus on where we have the greatest concerns, leaving other matters to others. In essence, just as I may claim some special authority (based on expertise, experience, or whatever) to impose certain decisions on you, I also respect a similar claim of authority by you. And on the whole this can work. (Indeed, there are whole areas I hope some one else will handle, because I can't. It can also fail, such as where authority is corrupted, but that is not so much a refutation of the principal as a matter of implementation.) And that, I believe, is the fundamental basis of 'republicanism': that yielding authority to others can work. - J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 23:25, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

WikiProjects

What about giving WikiProjects a more prominent role in the governance of the system? If we need structure, start from a solid foundation at the bottom. WikiProjects are already a very grass-roots method of applying structure to small areas of interest. Perhaps the WikiProjects should collaborate on a more formal level to form a larger structure and giving the WikiProject_Council a community mandate to do this would be the way forward. How to implement this idea is, naturally, left to the community consensus at large, but I think this would work better than a top-down traditional politic route. -- M2Ys4U ^(talk) 19:01, 23 November 2009 (UTC)

Let's not fix what ain't broken

The most amazing thing about Wikipedia is that it works — and works incredibly well — without any organized editorial structure. In fact, I contend that the "problems" that this proposal is meant to solve simply do not exist. The "chaos" that some perceive is of no consequence to readers, and does not prevent editors from contributing. Those "problems" only seem to be perceived by a minority of people who like to discuss editorial policies; or who assume that one of WP's goals is to become as stylistically homogeneous as a classical encyclopedia. The latter is, to say the least, an exceedingly naive notion.
On the contrary, if more old editors are leaving than new editors are joining (as some statistics seem to indicate), it is probably because WP is becoming more structured and bureaucratic; so that contributing is becoming harder and less fun. Back in 2003, all that an editor needed to know before contributing was the wiki markup syntax. Today there are hundreds of style and policy pages that one is urged to read before typing the first sentence.
Wikiprojects (or any other federative structure one may invent) only contribute to this burden. Many editors can and do contribute to articles that fall under the purview of dozens of different WikiProjects. One cannot expect that every such editor will read and honor the policies of each project, much less take the time to join them or discuss and vote on their policies. Most editors would probably give up and find a more pleasant and productive way to waste their free time.
In fact, I conjecture that, for any WikiProject, most of the improvement that has occurred on articles under its purview would have been occurred just as well and quickly (if not even better and more quickly) if the WikiProject did not exist. For one thing, the time that was wasted by editors in purely bureaucratic Project maintenance tasks (such as slapping the Project's template on Talk pages) would have been better employed in editing contents.
As others have pointed out, Wikipedia editors are not meant to interact with each other; so Dunbar's number and other sociological theories are simply irrelevant. Editors do and should interact only with articles. When someone decides to edit an article, he/she should not have to know who else edited it, much less depend on their consent; all he needs (or should need) to know is the article itself, and possibly its talk page. (The fact that comments in talk pages are signed is irrelevant; there too, only the contents of the remarks matter, not who posted them.)
PLEASE, let's not try to "fix" what is working so well. If anything needs to be changed, it should be in the direction making WP more chaotic and less organized, with fewer policies and simpler editing protocols. All the best, --Jorge Stolfi (talk) 20:22, 23 November 2009 (UTC)

Lift the 1RR on Cluebot

Hello Wikipedia Community,

I have been thinking about all the time that fine editors spend combating vandalism, that they could instead be using for other things. I have also been noticing how good Cluebot is at finding various types of vandalism by itself. Now, as many of you know, Cluebot adheres to the 1 Revert Rule. That means:

This bot will not revert the same article and user more than once per day. There is one exception: This bot will revert today's featured article or any page listed in the opt-in list for angry mode as many times as it finds vandalism. The bot will not revert to itself or one of its friends (MartinBot/VoABot II).

I wanted to see how many editors here would be willing to lift/revise this rule as Cluebot has definitely proven itself (almost a Million Edits). I would love to see this wonderful bot allow users to spend their valuable time doing things other then hitting the revert button when a 12 year old decides to copy and paste "penis" 100 times on a page.
--Tim1357-(what?...ohhh) 02:02, 24 October 2009 (UTC)

It's not the number of edits that would prove its worth, but the accuracy. 1RR is probably to allow editors to correct false-positives. That said, I've never actually seen it make a mistake. Equazcion (talk) 02:09, 24 October 2009 (UTC)

Exactly, Ive never seen it make a mistake either!Tim1357-(what?...ohhh) 02:28, 24 October 2009 (UTC)

I'd support it on a trial basis, until more is known about what it could do. Kevin Rutherford (talk) 03:40, 24 October 2009 (UTC)

• I'm not taking a position at this time, but rather just explaining why it has a 1RR... If a human reverts something they think is vandalism and and they are undone, the person might re-evaluate their choice and come to a different decision. A bot, however, will always reach the same conclusion. --ThaddeusB (talk) 03:48, 24 October 2009 (UTC)

This might be reasonable, but a dry run should be done first. The bot would post to a page each diff that it would revert, but didn't due to the 1RR rule. The main issue with this is that the damage caused by an error can't be simply repaired by reverting the bot, as there's WP:BITE issues to deal with as well. One possible way of dealing with the issue ThaddeusB notes would be to give second or later reverts a higher vandalism score so that borderline cases wouldn't be picked up as vandalism the second time. Mr.Z-man 17:08, 24 October 2009 (UTC)

Wow, why didn't I think of that? Only edits that it is SURE are vandalism (i.e. have a very high 'score') would be reverted. And one other thing, despite repeated attempts, I cannot seem to get ahold of cobi to tell him about this, someone needs to do that. Tim1357--(what?...ohhh) 17:42, 24 October 2009 (UTC)

Z-man's approach sounds reasonable, as a toe in the water: let's see how many false positives there are. Incidentally, does the bot take page visibility into account? Rd232 ^talk 20:12, 25 October 2009 (UTC)

So how do I move forward with this? Tim1357 (talk) 21:51, 27 October 2009 (UTC)

User talk:ClueBot Commons, I think. Rd232 ^talk 11:27, 28 October 2009 (UTC)

Agree with Z-man, let's see if there is a problem here that needs solving before taking the handcuffs off. –xeno^talk 14:36, 28 October 2009 (UTC)

Seconded. Is there actually a problem that this proposal solves, or is it merely a solution in search of a problem? Shereth 15:27, 28 October 2009 (UTC)

Not sure what you're getting at. The proposed trial - listing (a random sample of) reverts Cluebot doesn't do due to 1RR restriction - will tell us to what extent the 1RR restriction limits Cluebot's effectiveness, and whether the restriction could be relaxed in some way to enhance effectiveness. I can't see how else you would know. Rd232 ^talk 15:50, 28 October 2009 (UTC)

Both of us simply agreed that having this listing is a necessary first step before lifting the restriction. –xeno^talk 15:53, 28 October 2009 (UTC)

OK. Textual communication, eh. Rd232 ^talk 16:20, 28 October 2009 (UTC)

This is kind of after-the-fact, but as long as cluebot continues to follow the "never revert to myself" rule, I can't see lifting the 1RR having a negative effect. --King Öomie 17:01, 28 October 2009 (UTC)

True, I think. But doesn't it also mean lifting 1RR won't have any positive effect? Well maybe not, but it certainly limits it. That would be another area worth exploring - how many cluebot edits are foregone due to that rule, and what do they look like, and how many false positives. Rd232 ^talk 17:09, 28 October 2009 (UTC)

As a small, unscientific sample, I took a look at ten consecutive ClueBot edits from a month ago. None of them were reverted so I doubt that 1RR makes much of a difference one way or another and it seems to me better to allow humans to override the machine rather than the other way around. A bigger problem is that ClueBot would undo a vandal and the vandal would then immediately go in and make a completely different vandalism edit on the same article which would then often have to be reverted by a human. Perhaps instead of changing the 1RR rule there should be a cooldown rule to block an anonymous user whose edit was reverted from making a change to the same page for 15 min. Users who really are trying to make constructive edits will probably be annoyed but willing to wait a short period of time before trying again but I think a vandal won't have the patience.--RDBury (talk) 17:02, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

That sounds improvable - I'd say Cluebot could treat 1RR as meaning it won't revert the same change twice in one day, by the same user on the same article. Different changes by the same user should be caught equally. How many false positives for that? ... Incidentally, where's the bot creator/owner? Does he know about this discussion? Rd232 ^talk 17:19, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

Well, that would require Cluebot to keep a running database of every change it reverts every day, and then compare every edit it scores against every one of those changes. At the end of the day, I think Cluebot would be running QUITE slowly. --King Öomie 15:44, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

(unindent)To follow up, I did another survey on 30 consecutive ClueBot edits (not including any of the previous sample. 28 of the reverted edits were from anonymous users. Of those, 7 users made follow-up vandalism edits on the same page, i.e. within a short time of making the original vandalism edit. Some of these made repeated edits for a total 10 follow-up vandalism edits. Of these 10, 9 were reverted by a human and 1 was reverted by a different bot. To respond to rd232, there wouldn't have been any false positives for his proposed rule in thie sampled edits. But I should note that while none of ClueBot's edits in the sample were reverted, some of the follow-up vandalism was very close to the original vandalism.--RDBury (talk) 18:02, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

PS. I left a note on User:Cobi's talk page.--RDBury (talk) 18:11, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

Another followup, just to cover all the bases I looked at the 3 reports on ClueBot's false positives page. It appears then the users making the edits did the edit over rather than reverting Cluebot's revert. In all cases while the edits weren't vandalism, they were controversial and aggressive and usually re-reverted by a human. Maybe there should be a some instruction to direct users to try suggesting the change on the article's talk page instead of re-doing the edit.--RDBury (talk) 18:38, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

Response by Cobi

After going over this discussion, I see a few suggestions here:

• Make the unreverted caught vandalism public for further review. This will be trivial to do.
• Turn 1RR off (turn the bot into angry mode).
• Interpret 1RR to mean 1 revert per user per specific edit data per article per day. This means I have to store the edit data for the day. This can get large in RAM.
• Add a cooldown. This needs to be done with MediaWiki, not ClueBot.

I'll create a page shortly for ClueBot to post unreverted caught vandalism to. -- Cobi^(t|c|b) 19:17, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

The bot will create a page at User:ClueBot/PossibleVandalism when it first has an unreverted caught vandalism. -- Cobi^(t|c|b) 19:32, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

Score 1 a bunch for the bot so far... Can you tell it to log new entries on a new line rather than blowing out the old ones? –xeno^talk 20:49, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

Second that - maybe with a limit of some kind to prevent the page bloating unmanageably. Rd232 ^talk 20:52, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

Could you have it so the bot doesn't clear the contents of the page whenever it adds new ignored vandalism.? That way we could see just how much vandalism is not reverted because of the 1RR. It would be nice to see how long that page gets after a week. Tim1357 (talk) 21:55, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

The Possible Vandalism log is a good start. You say "Interpret 1RR to mean 1 revert per user per specific edit data per article per day. This means I have to store the edit data for the day." I had imagined you could compare a user's edit with any prior edits they made that day; is that too computationally or bandwidth-wise intensive? Also, is Cluebot's user warning message (this one) editable? I think it may be improvable. Rd232 ^talk 20:17, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

Special:Prefixindex/User:ClueBot/Warning -- Cobi^(t|c|b) 20:29, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

Cool. Is that linked from the bot page? I did look there. Anyway, I've proposed a revision at User talk:ClueBot/Warnings/Vandal1. Rd232 ^talk 20:47, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

It appears that the 1RR makes the bot miss an average of 130 vandalism's a day. Tim1357 (talk) 19:59, 31 October 2009 (UTC)

Just curious, have there been any developments on this? Equazcion (talk) 08:05, 8 Nov 2009 (UTC)

Where do we go from here? The BRFA? Or do we just let it die? Tim1357 (talk) 01:36, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

The BRFA indicated it would stick to 1RR, so a new BRFA lifting the restriction would be ideal. Alternatively, an informal note at WT:BRFA asking a BAG member to simply rubberstamp may be adequate. –xeno^talk 15:49, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

I don't think rubber stamping this proposal is a good idea. Community members don't like being reverted by bots. I see that this is not going to revert the same editor twice, but I'd like a full discussion on the issue. --IP69.226.103.13 (talk) 19:37, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

Can you point out a diff where the bot reverted a community member, as opposed to a mere vandal? –xeno^talk 14:54, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

WikiContest (or WikiTournament)

Very simple:
The WikiCup is held every year, which may be a very long period (in my opinion). How about an event within a month? (could be also in periods of two or three months). Like the WikiCup, each participant with his flagicon (but in this case, can be repeated). Two categories: minor league —in which only mainspace edits, page creation and minor edits are counted (individually) and major league —in which previous is considered, but also more points for upgrading to featured status, GA, DYK, etc.
Also, contributions to other wikimedia projects could be considered for users with global accounts (to verify the right). These could be uploading images, translations (from or to another language, news, etc...) which may form part of an actual series of contributions to an article here. - ☩Damërung ☩. -- 14:09, 1 November 2009 (UTC)

Anything that encourages article creation is a good idea. I'm all for it. - ʄɭoʏɗiaɲ ^τ _¢ 19:03, 1 November 2009 (UTC)

Yes, I agree, but making a contest/tournament out of it may encourage mass-creation of articles just because a user wants to increase their contest/tournament standings. Besides, Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a game site. Guoguo12 (talk) 21:03, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

There is certainly nothing that prohibits someone from setting something like this up. However, it is a lot of work so don't be surprised if no one volunteers to run it. --ThaddeusB (talk) 21:21, 1 November 2009 (UTC)

I can't say I like this idea. I see too many editors getting huge edit counts by adding indiscriminate trivia to articles. This is something to be discouraged rather than encouraged. I agree there is a need for more recognition efforts of editors, especially for some of the more thankless tasks such as fact checking. But I would rather see an award for making a single very good addition rather than 100 bad ones.--RDBury (talk) 20:02, 4 November 2009 (UTC)

These kinds of games should not be encouraged. That one of the goals is to encourage development of articles is a good thing; the notion of awarding people with prizes, even if they are nothing more than a silly graphic to post on their userpage, is not something the project should condone. But I'm just a grumpy fun-hater, so feel free to ignore me :p Shereth 20:07, 4 November 2009 (UTC)

Wowow, now, I never thought or talked about awards... Actually, when I posted this proposal here, I totally forgot about prizes or recognitions. I see you two talked about awards, and now that I think of it, maybe using just the existing awards (if desired) is just fine, I mean, we don´t have to create new ones or neither even give them forcibly. About that thing of the non-totally-enciclopedic edits, well I think it should be encouraged the making of more constructive edits instead of discouraging games which aims to that. But that´s just my opinion of something that I wanted to come up with. More opinions would be also apreciated again. - ☩Damërung ☩. -- 03:51, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

Well, in any kind of contest/game/competition there is an inherent award. To use a broader example, even if the Yankees had not been awarded a trophy for winning the World Series, they would still be awarded the title of "World Series Champion" for the year. A winner of a monthly WikiTournament, even if no one bothers with creating a trophy graphic to paste on their talk page, is still awarded with the title of "Winner of WikiTournament November". That's what I was getting at, really - it is my philosophy that we should not be in the habit of doling out titles/awards/recognitions, particularly when they might be sought out as a reward for winning something. I have no issues with the Barnstars that are granted individually for services already rendered. Again, it's all just my opinion. Shereth 14:37, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

Here's another thought. Some editors have taken it upon themselves to recognize editors that they view as "outstanding" with a Wikipedian of the Day/Month type award. To me this sort of arrangement is acceptable because no one is competing for the title; it is not granted based on reaching a certain set of goals/criteria first (or best), but rather is granted by identifying someone's existing contributions and rewards them for making good contributions without any anticipation of a reward. Therein lies the difference. I'd have no qualms about a group of intersted editors forming a kind of task force to identify good Wikipedians and "reward" them with being recognized as such, but formal competitions are not the sort of thing that I believe should be encouraged. Shereth 14:45, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

A prize, even if it is a fancy barnstar, gives a goal to reach for. Why do we have an edit count? Why do we have barnstars that you "qualify" for by edit count/longevity? Prizes make people feel good, and they drive their ambitions. A prize just gives people, in all their vanity, something to attain. - ʄɭoʏɗiaɲ ^τ _¢ 14:56, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

Perhaps I just prefer encouraging those editors whose goal they wish to attain is a valuable and reputable encyclopedia over those editors whose goal is a userpage full of barnstars and DYK question marks and shiny FA stars ... but again, that's just me :) In my perfect little world there would be no edit counts, no FA stars on userpages ... but I understand Wikipedia is not my perfect little world and that I am probably just being too serious for my own good. Shereth 15:04, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

If Wikipedia only had editors who were working purely out of selflessness, we would not be nearly as successful as we are now; we may not have been successful at all. Mr.Z-man 23:21, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

I think a 'game' like this one is a very good way to encourage editors to make a valuable and reputable encyclopedia. Even if their goal is only to have a barnstar, I don´t care as long as it helps to improve wikipedia. And yes, there are some edits which are not much valuable like the trivia sections, but we could find a way to avoid that and use this game to the benefit of wikipedia. - ☩Damërung ☩. -- 15:04, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

I don't see how a competition of this type can function on a less than a month time frame. In my experience a GA review, from the time requested until completed, can takes over a month. FAC likewise can last weeks. In those circumstances your ability to gain "points" would not be determined by as much by your skill or editting prowess, but by the speed in which reviewers can get to your article, which varies significantly by topic area, especially at GA. —Charles Edward ^{(Talk | Contribs)} 21:22, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

How about this: minor league lasts a month or two. Major league lasts three monts or four. - ☩Damërung ☩. -- 08:05, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

Get rid of PROD

I've been thinking about it for a while now. The process involved in PROD, while ideally designed to reduce the workload at afd, leaves too many articles open for deletion that simply don't have anyone watching them. Articles that have inherent notability (such as many facets of geographical locations. Towns and such in countries that do not have any involved English editors) can often be deleted without notice to anyone. These articles are not "less important" because they do not have any sources, or because they haven't changed in several years, or because they contain a bare minimum of information. These articles have broken the ground where other editors will one day expand upon and fill in information.

In short, PROD only determines that nobody is watching an article, not that its deletion is uncontested. All non-speedy deletions merit some discussion. - ʄɭoʏɗiaɲ ^τ _¢ 19:20, 3 November 2009 (UTC)

I don't know of an admin that would delete an article through PROD that they believe has poor reasoning to be deleted... I don't totally disagree with you, but there are people who watch WP:PRODSUM too.--Unionhawk ^{Talk E-mail Review} 19:24, 3 November 2009 (UTC)

This sounds more like an argument of deletionism versus inclusionism. As noted above, WP:PROD doesn't automatically delete pages after seven days. It still comes down to a judgment call by the acting admin. --King Öomie 20:44, 3 November 2009 (UTC)

Admins should not be deleting article on-sight merely because they are an expired PROD. Spurious nominations can (and should be) declined. Shereth 20:46, 3 November 2009 (UTC)

Well you can look in the deletion log, and ask an admin to have a second look at deletions that look as if there ws a prod on a notable topic. Do you have some examples you would like restored? Graeme Bartlett (talk) 20:48, 3 November 2009 (UTC)

You are assuming an admin opens the article and looks at it. There are several different tools designed to allow one to delete entire categories (like old PROD categories) without the bother of having to manually open each page. Dragons flight (talk) 20:55, 3 November 2009 (UTC)

That would be bad, and I would be disappointed if that occurred (without review). People have been shot down at RfA's for missing a single CSD borderline case. If we have admins deleting entire categories of content without review, that would be a very bad example. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 21:48, 3 November 2009 (UTC)

I would expect that an administrator deleting all expired prods without bothering to look at them would be admonished, if not desysopped. That's a severe misuse of tools. -- Atama頭 22:07, 3 November 2009 (UTC)

Well perhaps you should talk to the frequent deleters of PRODs and ask them about their process. (The history of PRODSUM makes it easier to identify who is is really doing the deletions.) For example, NuclearWarfare (talk · contribs · blocks · protections · deletions · page moves · rights · RfA) is a frequent closer of PRODs and often deletes 20 such pages in a single minute. I would assume he uses a tool to accomplish deletions at that speed. Now, he could have reviewed every one of those beforehand, in which case there is no issue. Historically though there are certainly examples of people using tools to clear deletion backlogs with no review. For example, I remember someone deleting some 700 disputed fair use images without looking at their content or considering the validity of the dispute. Such people can get yelled at, but they are rarely desysoped. Dragons flight (talk) 22:45, 3 November 2009 (UTC)

I'd like to point out that when I was an admin, I often handled several days of PROD at a time. I'd open up dozens or hundreds of tabs, go through them all (removing more than a few nominations, although in general PROD seemed pretty accurate & I consider myself an inclusionist) either editing them or opening up the deletion field, and then I'd make a second pass. So even though the log would show many deletions a minute (and even per second if I was typing particularly fast), I was still reviewing them all exactly as they should've been. Doing it this batch way saved me vast amounts of time because I didn't have to wait for several seconds of loading & rendering time for each page. From the outside, I don't think there's any easy way to see whether NuclearWarfare is employing a batch method or not. (Although I suppose you could look to see whether there are miscellaneous edits or PROD removals in the 20 or 30 minutes preceding a mass-deletion.) --Gwern (contribs) 00:52 10 November 2009 (GMT)

• oppose if an article has no one watching it, I don't see it as much of a step towards creating a genuine article on the topic. Stubs are good up to a point, as sort of an outline for future development, provided it's actually a good outline. But I would think that the unwatched status of unwatched stubs might be correlated with them not being particularly good outline items. In cases where that's not so, the article can always be recreated. There's a legitimate concern that the editors who do care might have large watchlists and not notice the PROD, but that could be dealt with by formalizing the courtesy notices into a requirement. --Trovatore (talk) 20:54, 3 November 2009 (UTC)
• Oppose. Prod is a valuable process. There is a group of regular prod patrollers who could always do with extra help. I regularly prod patrol, and in my experience the vast majority of articles deleted by prod have no chance of meeting our criteria. We delete maybe 60-80 articles per day via prod, and I rarely deprod more than two from a single day. Prod avoids the drama and sucking up of time of editors that AfD involves, and it is less severe than speedy deletion. Admins don't just blindly delete expired prods as they can contest the prod themselves if they see fit, and any prodded article can be restored at any time. Another option if you don't have the time to properly improve a prodded article is to move it to the Article Incubator. Fences&Windows 21:20, 3 November 2009 (UTC)
• Oppose - I wonder what basis Floydian has for this argument, as it doesn't seem to match what WP:PROD states or how proposed deletions are actually processed. Articles that do not have any sources, haven't changed in several years, or contain a bare minimum of information would be as unlikely to be deleted via PROD as they would via AfD or CSD. As said above, every article deleted through PROD has been reviewed by an administrator who uses his or her own judgment regarding the deletion justification given when the deletion is proposed. Should we get rid of speedy deletions because someone might incorrectly put an A7 tag on a notable article subject that isn't being watched? -- Atama頭 22:05, 3 November 2009 (UTC)
• Oppose - PROD helps keep the workload at AFD manageable. Users' time is not an infinite resource, we should allocate it to discuss articles that actually might warrant a discussion. If anything we need to use PROD more. Any article deleted after a unanimous AFD could potentially have been PROD'ed. Mr.Z-man 23:16, 3 November 2009 (UTC)
• Alternative: WT:PROD#Userfy PRODs instead of delete?. Rd232 ^talk 00:57, 4 November 2009 (UTC)

The basis I have, which initially got me going on this idea (aside from my own opinion that as long as an article isn't utter BS of defamatory than it usually deserves a place here) was the over PRODing of articles by Less Heard van U (who is an admin I believe, and may have been deleting those articles after 7 days), who was doing so solely on the basis of A) a lack of sources and B) a certain size requirement. - ʄɭoʏɗiaɲ ^τ _¢ 03:00, 4 November 2009 (UTC)

If you think the articles should have remained, tell the deleting admin, and they should restore it as a contested PROD.--Unionhawk ^{Talk E-mail Review} 03:09, 4 November 2009 (UTC)

That's an issue to take up with the admin, or his/her behavior. There's no benefit to changing our policy based on one incident. BTW, you can see who deleted an article in the logs. Would be best to do that before making accusations. — The Hand That Feeds You:^Bite 18:58, 4 November 2009 (UTC)

PROD was intended to replace AFD and CSD. Somehow that process stopped halfway, and now we have 3 systems, instead of one good one. I wonder how much time it would take to take things a few steps forward again, sometime soon? --Kim Bruning (talk) 01:30, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

Kim, I think your memory is betraying you on this one. I don't believe anyone seriously proposed PROD as a replacement, but rather it was originally proposed as a way to take some of the load off a chronically overworked AFD. Dragons flight (talk) 01:56, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

I know at least some folks (like me ;-) )wanted it to be side-by-side and then eventually replace, because AFD at the time was really bad, and admin deletion sucks in general. AFD has improved since then, CSD hasn't. It might be nice to actually work on updating the systems with what we've learned since last time, and simplifying besides :-) --Kim Bruning (talk) 02:10, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

I don't know why we need multiple systems and huge bureaucratic structures for deletion proposals. There should be one template that you stick on the talk page if you think a page warrants deletion. Have a bot date these templates, then an admin comes round after the appropriate time and decides what to do (based on the arguments given, if any, plus his/her own knowledge about wider consensus). No fuss (well fuss about whether to delete the page, obviously, but no additional complications spawned by the process itself). Ah, but that would be too simple, we have to let the wikibureaucrats have somewhere to play... --Kotniski (talk) 16:14, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

We don't have to let 'em play at all! I think you could sort of treat it like a hygiene issue analogous to -say- malaria at the panama canal: Eliminate the breeding grounds for them and/or the vector (simplify and tidy areas where too much bureaucracy has encroached), and inoculate people against them (by getting people to understand IAR and consensus as early as possible)

Do you think we can still stamp out the disease? ;-) --Kim Bruning (talk) 22:21, 5 November 2009 (UTC) To be clear, I'm not sure AFD is as much of a problem area as it was years ago. I think the bureaucrats have retreated to other areas.

Getting rid of PROD would at least concentrate the problem in one area (AFD), rather then spreading it out. The real issue with the current deletion process is simple: it's not structured enough. Surveys and widespread general opinion have shown for quite a long time now that at least the perception, if not the reality of, our current deletion process is simply too random. I know from my own personal investigations that the admins who regularly participate in AFD definitely have a brain on their shoulders, and there is at least a DRV process now in order to take care of the more egregious deletion problems. Those two items make me fairly confident that the majority of deletions that do occur are at least defensible. The fact remains that the process itself is still far too random, however. We all know that there are articles that almost every would agree should be deleted, yet when those articles manage to be identified they can still be difficult to delete. More serious is the fact that many "borderline" articles continue to be deleted on a daily basis. What some deletion advocates seem to (continuously!) fail to grasp is just how permanent and therefore demoralizing and damaging deletion is to author/editors... I don't want to turn this into more of an Inlcusionist rant then it already is, so I'll end here by simply saying that I support deprecating the confusing and unnecessary PROD procedure.
— V = I * R (talk to Ω) 05:00, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

FWIW, the majority of deletions are via CSD. In terms of deletions per day, there are about as many articles deleted via PROD as via AFD, and about 10 times as many articles deleted through CSD as AFD and PROD combined. Mr.Z-man 05:33, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

Yeah. Honestly, I only use PROD if it's only borderline CSD. Most of my prods get deleted under speedy criteria.--Unionhawk ^{Talk E-mail Review} 05:43, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

The thing is that you guys are right. Nobody is disputing the point that probably 99.9999999+% of all deletions are perfectly acceptable... but, none of that matters. The 0.0000001% of deletions that are not acceptable are the ones that are noticed, and the fact is that they should be. No matter how much potential good that the proper deletions gain the project, the fact is that the few instances of bad deletions do enough damage to far outweigh the good. At least, in my opinion.

There are those who take similar views and create an ideology that "all deletions are bad", which is just as much of a problem as doing nothing with the current deletion process is. I personally feel that a temporary moratorium on deletions (and a short one at that, possibly even just a few hours) is at least called for. However, that action is predicated on the belief that we can and should actually make a change that will better the project as a whole. Article deletion for it's own sake shold be stopped. Preventing article deletions for the sake of preventing deletions should be stopped as well. The process as a whole needs to be tweaked, at least, and intentionally slowing it all down certainly couldn't hurt (although, admittedly I do recognize that doing so will anger a certain percentage of the editorial population). At the very least, if all but the most egregious deletions take 7 days (or possibly even a couple of days longer)... who or what is harmed by that?
— V = I * R (talk to Ω) 06:56, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

I would say that even if 5% of deletions by Prod were erroneous, the system is working fine. When people notice that their article is gone, they generally contract the deleting admin, and the article is restored. Abductive (reasoning) 07:01, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

No, no, no... anything as "in your face" as deleting articles simply cannot stand up to this line of thinking. If we were talking about normal open editing procedures then I would agree with the point that you're making here, but the simple fact is that we're not.

Article deletion needs to be treated with the same... "respect" (for lack of a better word) that blocking is treated with, and for the same reasons. I'm not arguing that the deletions are a mistake at all, just as the vast majority of blocks are perfectly acceptable. However, in the exact same manner that good blocks still create controversy and emotion, deletions will and should cause the very similar reactions.

Think about this: if there was some sort of a "speedy block" policy/procedure being proposed, what would your reaction be to that? Granted, the analogy is far from perfect here, but at least give it a chance.
— V = I * R (talk to Ω) 07:21, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

I guess I was just wondering why you seem to have a problem with the lack of a formal process for PROD and not for CSD, even though PROD can be overturned by anyone for any reason at any time. Why are you assuming that all of the bad deletions come through PROD? It isn't a "speedy" procedure at all, so your analogy doesn't make any sense. PROD takes as long as an AFD. Mr.Z-man 17:05, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

Actually, if I had my druthers, I would prefer to severely restrict the use of CSD, along with simply switching the PROD procedure to use AFD instead (which is effectively what we're talking about here). I don't really believe that any change in the deletion process is possible, but this at least started a discussion about it. It's just... complicated. For newer editors, and especially for part time editors (which, in my view, are probably the most important editorial members of Wikipedia), the fact that there are three different processes with a fourth follow up (CSD, PROD, AFD, with DRV to follow up) is simply confusing and overwhelming. The WP:DELETION document is in a perpetually confusing state. Whether someone comes along and decides to start one of the deletion processes on an article is way to random, and CSD and PROD almost always occur too quickly for non-regular editors (and even many regulars) to really follow the process (never mind the fact that there are simply too many deletion discussions to really follow). PROD does take as long as AFD, but it's a mostly silent procedure so the perception is still there of fast change.

Anyway, as I said earlier I don't really think that there are many bad deletions, if there are any at all. This isn't actually a discussion about reality though, it's a discussion about perceptions. All of you who oppose this proposal are on solid factual grounds, but the fact is that doesn't change the perceptions of those who are supportive. We're talking past one another still, at this point.
— V = I * R (talk to Ω) 21:31, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

• Oppose. The proposer has brought up some hypotheticals, but I don't see any evidence that clearly notable articles or stubs are being routinely deleted via the PROD process simply because nobody is watching them. Sure, it could happen, but it's very unlikely. The system works, there is oversight to it, there's a strong fail-safe worked in to curb abuse (anyone can ask for it back at any time, an article can only be marked with a PROD once and only if it meets certain criteria.), and while having three separate processes can be confusing to outsiders, it's not that hard to explain things. I'm not entirely convinced PROD is necessary anymore, to be honest, since I'm not sure the problem it was intended to solve exists anymore. But I see no reason it should be dismantled because of what might happen in theory (if we're doing that, let's drop CSD first. In theory, one could get the main page deleted that way). --UsaSatsui (talk) 14:59, 7 November 2009 (UTC)
• Oppose. Most PRODs in my experience are merited (and I deleted hundreds if not thousands of PRODs), usually have been looked over by a second user (excluding the deleting admin), and they do us a genuine service in considerably lightening the load on AfD, letting people focus on truly borderline articles. The userfication proposal has merit, but that's a separate issue (though I encourage Floydian to take it up next!). --Gwern (contribs) 00:57 10 November 2009 (GMT)
• Oppose I regularly partrol PRODs, and regularly deprod about 5-10% of what's PROD'ed. I routinely restore prods per request... just check my talk page archives. The problem may be with individual admins not doing their jobs well, but not with PROD itself. Jclemens (talk) 04:23, 10 November 2009 (UTC)
• Oppose. It's too easy to stop, if anyone really cares. Unschool 06:14, 10 November 2009 (UTC)
• Oppose. PROD is vital for its drama-reducing effect on the deletion process.—S Marshall ^Talk/_Cont 21:49, 10 November 2009 (UTC)
• Oppose, but that's not to say that the process doesn't need serious improvement. Unwatched and uncared-for pages are a problem (I've seen many decent articles go), and the deletions shouldn't be done blindly. That said, the process has its place. As an idea it's much better than what AfD has become. Let's delete AfD instead. I'm not kidding. --wwwwolf (barks/growls) 21:21, 11 November 2009 (UTC)
  • "You are User:Ed Poor, and I collect my 2 pounds", or however the game goes? I'm getting Strong Deja-vu here. ;-) --Kim Bruning (talk) 15:19, 19 November 2009 (UTC) perhaps it's a glitch in the matrix?

• Oppose with alternative - require articles that have been around more than, say, 30 days to have 3 people agreeing to the deletion instead of just 2. This would allow today's "very easy" prods for new articles that weren't speedy-able but have a higher standard for lightly-watched articles. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs)/(e-mail) 02:05, 18 November 2009 (UTC)
• Comment while I don't follow PRODs it does seem likely that, as I hae observed with CSDs, they do get deleted on the basis that thye are correctly and validly nominated. When I used to do CSD's it was delete, delete, delete.. wait lets examine this one: edit- not speedy, save - the page has been deleted by someone else - sigh, undelete. It may be better now of course. Rich Farmbrough, 21:19, 18 November 2009 (UTC).

SPOILER ALERT disclaimers

Very long thread; copied to /Spoilers.

Edits by anonymous users

After some 60, 70 edits in the article Dodo the progress has been aproximatly zero. Isn't it time to stop allowing anonymous users making edits in Wikipedia articles? Jan Arkesteijn (talk) 00:53, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

No, no, no, no. We've been through at least three different proposals already in the last two months about restricting IPs and newbies. When will it end? What is the point in getting ride of IPs? Why is everyone so intent on keeping out new blood? Why not put on the main page- we have all the editors we need, dont bother editing unless you want to be one of us". (reference to an old horror movie "Freaks") No more IP or newbie bashing around here ok?Camelbinky (talk) 01:21, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

That was rather harsh (and ironic) considering by most measures Jan is also a newbie.

Jan, please see this link explaining why this perennial proposal is unliekly to ever be adopted. --ThaddeusB (talk) 01:25, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

The other responses notwithstanding, we do semi-protect articles which are frequent or ongoing targets of anonymous vandalism. TenOfAllTrades(talk) 01:41, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

Well, considering the fact that of the 5 effective improvements in that list only one was made by an anonymous IP (which sheds a doubt on the 82% mentioned here) this article applies for an everlasting state of semi-protection. All the edits minus one were with the benefit of hindsight vandalisms and subsequent corrections. Eventually people will get tired of reverting vandalism and will stop doing so. There are articles on the outskirts of Wikipedia, where barely anyone goes. The information presented there is by the nature of Wikipedia unreliable. The motto of Wikipedia is to feel free and improve. This means, we should improve Wikipedia itself also, by safeguarding against the presentation of mis-information. A "No, no, no, no" will not suffice. Jan Arkesteijn (talk) 11:11, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

Camelbinsky, well do I remember how you responded when, I think it was in September this year, just this very idea was put forth.

I hardly think I need to repeat that my own policy was we need to remember Wikipedia: Please do not bite the newcomers, and should not put new editors off who may still have to learn to set up userpages. A common response when this proposal was made before was why did the initiator of the proposal not check the "perennial proposals" - I rather think that if this proposal is made again, it should be sent to the "perennial proposals list" (sorry, I need an administrator to help me here!) ACEOREVIVED (talk) 19:48, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

Above it is claimed that requiring registration would "keep out new blood" by deterring new users. But the rationale at WP:Perennial proposals#Editing is that registration would not deter vandals because it take them only "10 seconds to register". Whoa, wait a minute, which way is it going to be? Does registration deter, or not? This is argument based on perception, and that it is being swung both ways brings its validity into question. For all that everyone here may have an opinion about this, I have yet to see any solid data.

Similarly for the implied argument that registration would simply eliminate the "76% or 82% of anonymous edits [which] are intended to improve the encyclopedia". The implicit assumption is that in such cases anonymity is an absolute requirement, without which these editors (and editing) will simply disappear. Again, we really have no data about that, but I rather doubt that taking "10 seconds to register" would deter serious editors. (See also WP:Editors should be logged in users.) - J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 23:42, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

Well, its a good thing that policy on Wikipedia is determined through consensus of the Community and not consensus of facts and figures. So really, I dont see why some want or need to see any solid data. If the majority of us figure it probably isnt a smart idea (and I'm confident the majority does not want to force everyone to sign up) then it isnt going to happen and it doesnt matter how much data you have to support your idea that forcing them to sign up would be beneficial to Wikipedia. Some things, like these perennial "Wikipedia Patriot Act" ideas to eliminate vandalism by controlling IPs and newbies arent acceptable due to their loss of our core ideas of being open and freedom of editing and equality for all. Whats next, IPs and newbies cant comment on Village Pump, AN/I, noticeboards, article talk pages?Camelbinky (talk) 00:07, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

It may not deter "serious editors", but most serious editors already create accounts. The issue is that it would deter casual editors - people who might add some info or correct an error in what they read, but won't go out of their way looking for things to edit. Mr.Z-man 01:01, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

Mr Z, as usual, hit the nail on the head. Most of the IP editing I see are from IPs correct my poor spelling or grammar, and I assume but of course cant verify that they are doing so because they happened to be looking up something, saw the misspelling and corrected it, not because they are hardcore Wikipedia fanatics on a mission. Many seem to think that if your not a fanatic and not signing up you must be a vandal. Some just like to edit as they find things when reading things they are looking up, why force them to sign up or make it uncomfortable for them so they feel forced; we become a less effective source for the casual reader. And let us remember- the casual reader, our audience, is why we do this endeavor; we write for them, not for each other or for ourselves, in a way they are our boss. We should strive to function as they need us, and not attempt to convert them into editors or to force readers to understand our backroom bureaucracy (and despite resistance by myself and others, bureaucracy is what we have, unfortunately).Camelbinky (talk) 03:40, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

I am inclined to agree with Camelbinky's last comment. Some of us, such as those who have signed our names above, are happy to be logged-in editors - but there may be casual Wikipedians who only visit Wikipedia sporadically, who think they may have a go at editing and who have no intention of setting up a userpage. And why should they? That is up to them. To insist in edits from only logged-in editors would be a little like saying, in a parliamentary democracy, only members of politcal parties should have a right to vote. Each to one's own, some may be interested enough in Wikipedia to set up a userpage; others may have other pressing interests and not wish to do this. ACEOREVIVED (talk) 21:02, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

I really don't have any opposition to "casual editing" as such. But I am rather irked at the invalid argumentation used here. Particularly this argument that registration (eek! scream! there's that nasty word again!) is both a massive deterrent to casual editors, and, simultaneously, a negligible deterrent to vandals. Unless someone wants to explicate how that can be (I could, but I leave that as an exercise for the reader) you're arguing a contradiction, which is usually an indication of error. Of course, perhaps that doesn't matter if there is consensus ("burn the witches!") that false and invalid argumentation is perfectly acceptable. I had rather hoped that the expected level of argument would rise at least to the level expected of articles, but so be it. - J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 23:51, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

I have been thinking about J.Johnson's comments - and thank you, you gave me something to think about. However, I think the syllogism you present does not stand. It seems to be:

Some new Wikipedians, or casual Wikipedians, may be put off by having to register;

Some people intend on vandalism would quickly register;

Ergo, there is a contradiction here.

The fault in this syllogism is that "Some" does not equal "All". It seems to fall down because it assumes that "Some A is B" = "All A is B". Also, please remember that the Wikipedians who may be put off by registration are unlikely to be the vandals - so I think we can call the syllogism an error. ACEOREVIVED (talk) 21:01, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

I think you've gotten it somewhat backwards, but at the core, yes, that's my point, that there is a contradiction. Try looking at this way: there is a relation, call it "R" (something like "registration is a massive deterrent to editing Wikipeida"), which when applied to one group is argued to be true, but when applied to another group is argued to be false. So we have a seeming instance of "R()" and "not R()" – which would be a contradiction, and an indication of invalid argumentation.

Not that this is necessarily a contradiction, for, as you have hinted, it could be a matter of different domains. E.g., that most vandals are tough-minded characters not easily deterred by anything, and the casual drive-by editors that some folks are so keen on encouraging mostly panty-waisted wusses. (Note that no one [?] is saying that "all vandals would be deterred", or "no anonymous editors deterred"; we're contemplating overall effects. For which data would be useful.) But until that or some similar distinction is made, it is invalid to argue that registration is BOTH a massive deterrent and a negligible ("10 seconds") deterrrent. I think it is likely to be one OR the other, on which suitable data might inform us, but it is invalid to argue both ways without some kind distinction. Indeed, at this point arguing "R" either way is only an uninformed opinion. - J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 23:06, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

What J. Johnson seems to be saying above is that we should leave attempts at a priori reasoning behind, and therefore we should not work by looking for contradictions in syllogisms (or pointing out when contradictions are apparent and not real), and instead go for empirical data. Is registration a deterrent or not? Well, perhaps some one has done some empirical research into this, and it would be good to have a record of his or her data. You seem, J.Johnson, to be calling for more empirical research into Wikipedia editing. ACEOREVIVED (talk) 00:15, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

Close enough. What I have been saying is that in regard to the issue of whether anonymous editing should be allowed or not (our main topic here) a certain relation ("R") has been argued in a contradictory manner. Now it may be that this relation has some relevance to the issue, and as a side comment I have also suggested that suitable data could determine the truth or falsity of this relation, or even how it might appear to be both true and false. It is not so much empirical research as such that I am calling for as better argumentation – in which empirical data could play a role. - J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 20:32, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

Force preview before saving for new users

I know this is enabled by default on some Wikipedias, but this might work good here, we should force new users to "think" before they hit submit by requiring them to preview their edits before they save their changes. This, along with maybe additional messages that could be shown to new users, could help some of the issues we have with new users, and may slow down the flow of junk in new pages. However I predict downsides, backlash, etc, but if done right, this could be perfect.

Of course by "new" I mean, not autoconfirmed, or specific amount of edits, etc. ViperSnake151  Talk  17:25, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

So let's send a mixed message. I'd rather have to clean up after someone who inserted bold than not have them edit again. :( --Izno (talk) 21:27, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

Please see previous related discussion here and here.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 00:59, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

Argh, another "bite the newbie" proposal. Five now in the past two months? I'm going to propose that anyone who wants to limit IPs or newbies have their editing limited or constrained for a month and that way they can see how it feels to have their own proposals put on them. Its easy to propose to limit the abilities of people who arent you.Camelbinky (talk) 01:49, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

I'm confused; how exactly is this bitey? Treating them different = bitey? Does that mean not allowing them to move articles is bitey? --Golbez (talk) 07:59, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

Some limits come out of necessity (can't let everyone edit every page and page moves can easily be disruptive). Normal editing should be as easy as possible, though. Adding extra hurdles will simply discourage more people from editing. --MZMcBride (talk) 08:04, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

The problem is that WP's rules are getting more stringent all the time - mostly for good reason, as some nuisances find new ways to spam / POV-push / generally be WP:DE; and some rules are unavoidable, e.g. WP:BLP or WP:COPYVIO. I think we need a newbies' guide that: is simple and practical (not the usual bureaucratese in which policies and guidelines are written); will hand the main problems at least 95% of the time; has links to the full versions of the rules. --Philcha (talk) 17:49, 15 November 2009 (UTC)

Your wish is in the making as we speak - Wikipedia_talk:Help_Project#Simplified_ruleset_refactoring! This is part of a little drive we are having at making a few introductions to wikipedi a- the talk page one is nearing completion .. feel free to add any comments / suggestions over our way :) Lee∴V (talk • contribs) 20:11, 15 November 2009 (UTC)

Someone just down there had an idea of forcing previews for new pages by new users....plus showing them our law of unintended consequences write-up as well. I do agree with that idea. I would like to amend my decision and say it would be good for new users and new pages, just not every edit. ViperSnake151  Talk  20:42, 15 November 2009 (UTC)

How about: Make the "show preview" button bold instead of the "save page" button for non-logged-in editors and make it the default for new accounts. If a newbie changes his "preferred action" settings before making a single edit, that's his right. Of course, this means having one more setting. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs)/(e-mail) 02:09, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

Promote use of talk page for cleanup templates

I want to preface this with my personal opinion about cleanup templates: I think that they suck. I think that the fact that editorial tags are being placed on the article instead of on the talk page is the most obvious issue. More importantly though, the over use of these dang tags is just messy clutter that has always bugged the hell out of me.

Recognizing the obvious fact that many editors seem to take some pride in tagging articles however, I've never tried to TFD any of them or anything like that (deletions are not the answer to these sorts of concerns anyway, in my view). I do tend to remove tags that I come across though, either by simple removing those that don't seem to be supported (which occurs far to often) or addressing the relatively minor issue(s) which they are screaming at our readers about (which normally only takes as much time removing the tag!).

The biggest current issue with these tags though is that they are often simple placed on the article with the apparent expectation that the problem will be obvious to everyone else. Rather then being contentious about cleanup templates and their use, I think that the most constructive course to take is to try to encourage people tagging an article with a cleanup tag to post something about what needs to be done on the article's talk page. With that in mind I edited a couple of the templates to include a talk page link within the template itself. For an example, see: {{Anachronism}}, as well as several of the other (through "B") Category:Cleanup templates templates, which I edited back in September. The proposal here is to crowd source adding a similar talk page link to the remainder of those cleanup templates, as there are a tone of them (which is a whole other issue really, but that's something to be discussed elsewhere). If you're willing to help out please jump in and edit at least one template to include a link. Thanks!
— V = I * R (talk to Ω) 04:53, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

Tags should be applied to the article itself when they warn that there is currently a real problem with the article that the user should be aware of, such as not being neutral or seeming like original research. However, an acceptable article is not an ideal article. Tags made for issues for making an ideal article, rather than an acceptable one (such as {{Orphan}} or {{Dead end}}) should be moved to talk page instead MBelgrano (talk) 13:03, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

See WP:PEREN#Move maintenance tags to talk pages, MBelgrano. I do think the original idea here (encourage/require that the tagger actually use the talk page) is a good idea. Anomie⚔ 21:52, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

I was sort of tired when I wrote this, and reading over it now I realize that I got a bit off track and rambled a bit... not that I want to retract anything, as everything said above is the way I feel and I stand by it. However, the main point to posting this is to get help in adding links to the talk page, onto all of the cleanup templates.
— V = I * R (talk to Ω) 22:21, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

They don't all need links to the talk page. The likes of {{unreferenced}} and {{uncategorised}} are obvious problems that do not require further elaboration on the talk page. PC78 (talk) 22:36, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

Personally, I disagree. Even {{unreferenced}} should have something about it's addition to the article added to the talk page simply because if it's actually that obvious what the problem is then why not solve the actual problem rather then simply tagging the article? If there's a legitimate reason for the tag, then the person adding the tag should at the very least be able to say something like: "I can't find a source for (whatever) but I know it's true, so I've tagged the article with {{unreferenced}}."
— V = I * R (talk to Ω) 22:53, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

I see no reason at all to require any links to the talk page except for NPOV. Unreferenced is pretty darn clear - the article has no references. Ditto uncategorized. Its not for those who dislike tags to declare that those who find them useful must be forced to either fix the issue, write redundant and silly notes on the talk page to say "I tagged this as unreferenced because it is not referenced" or ignore it. Tagging articles for issues is valid Wikipedia work. -- Collectonian (talk · contribs) 23:08, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

You're mistaken in the belief that anything is being made to be "required" here. There's simply a link being added to the message boxes that points to the talk page. If the editor who adds the cleanup template does not wish to leave a message then (s)he doesn't need to.
— V = I * R (talk to Ω) 20:43, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

Not valid work

I see nothing about "tagging articles for issues" that makes it valid Wikipedia work. What is the purpose of fishing around from article to article (most of which the "editor" knows nothing about) tagging things, often without going to the talk page and seeing if there was a reason, checking history to see if a major rewrite is underway, what the status of the article is, how often people are working on it, etc. Fly-by editors are disruptive and usually ignorant of the topic. If you go to an article, know the topic, and actually fix the problems or go elsewhere. If you can take 20 seconds to slap a citation needed template on a sentence then you have 2 minutes to use Google and find the stinking source that is needed yourself. Perhaps if we implement Ohm's proposal and make more steps for these trollers then perhaps they find it too hard to keep doing and stop, or at least it will slow them down. We are here to put information in an encyclopedia, not learn new ways to tell others to do that job. Perhaps everyone should be forced to do at least four improving edits a week or they loose the right to tag at all.Camelbinky (talk) 04:23, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

Facepalm — The Hand That Feeds You:^Bite 23:56, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

Provide a metadata page for cleanup templates and wikiproject banners

Alternate proposal. Rationale: Many talk pages are created simply to hold WikiProject banners and are never used thereafter. A metadata page could hold both cleanup templates and wikiproject banners and said things could be displayed to users who want to see them based on prefs. Discuss. –xeno^talk 17:01, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

It sounds like an awful lot of work (almost every article has a project banner and more than 600,000 have maintenance templates). It has a high potential to break things (how many scripts, bots, and tools rely on the current system?). And the benefit seems rather minimal. I would like to eventually see metadata like coordinates and categories eventually switched to things that don't rely on the wikitext, but just creating a subpage to stick the templates on isn't that much better than what we currently have. Mr.Z-man 17:55, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

Yea, I agree that this seems to be too much work for too little gain. Besides, I like the project banners and everything else being right there on the talk pages. I never really have understood why people are bothered by that (aside from not letting things rage out of control on page headers, of course). Aside from that though, there's been some effort at removing sub-pages in slightly different topics anyway, so I don't think most editors (myself included, really) would appreciate this sort of thing going forward.
— V = I * R (talk to Ω) 20:37, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

Do talk pages created solely for placing talk-page templates constitute a problem at all? If so, why? MBelgrano (talk) 12:44, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

The bluelink indicates there might be some relevant discussion when in fact there is none. However, I do agree that this solution is a lot of makework with marginal gain. –xeno^talk 15:26, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

Municipal authorities/special district governments

Pennsylvania is home to over 1,700 "municipal authorities," similar to Special-purpose district in other states. These municipal authorities are alternate forms of local government, but are constituted for a special purpose--often for the governance of water, sewage, parking, housing, or economic development purposes. These entities are often described as "special purpose governments," as opposed to "general purpose governments", like cities or townships. They are not simply sub-levels of municipal government, they are governments themselves, with the taxing and bond-issuing power, condemnation power, and are subject the same ethics and open government laws as municipalities. I think this is a project that could be eventually extended to special purpose governments in all 50 states.

• The Proposal - The U.S. Census Bureau's Census of Governments documents and categorizes all of these entities twice per decade. I have organized this data into a spreadsheet, with the name, jurisdiction, type, location, and function of these municipal authorities, and I would like to utilize an approved bot to create stub-style articles on each of these entities. I understand that there are several natural questions that arise from this proposal.
  • Notability Question - There should be no shortage of significant, independent, and WP:reliable sources describing the each entity and its activities, as nearly every regional newspaper carries meeting summaries, financial data, and happenings in the local municipal authorities. In addition, these authorities leave significant paper trails, whether through official documents, like annual reports and meeting minutes. Finally, there is the Census of Governments data. As a separate thought on notability, the community has generally agreed that all governments, species, and villages are notable, a presumption that I think should be extended to municipal authorities/special-purpose districts.
  • Why a bot? - Because of the sheer volume of municipal governments identified in the Census of Governments, coding them by hand is not feasible. I have written and compiled all of the text already, but the task is too tedious to do manually.
  • Why just stubs? - The data is currently in spreadsheet format, allowing a bot to easily parse out the data into an article template that looks like a pretty good stub.
  • How about some examples? - Here is an example of what the template would look like. Here is a sample of what the stubs would look like. For this example, I picked a water authority.
  • I never heard of these things! - That's understandable. But, we still have articles on obscure mathematical models that I never heard of. Here are big examples:Sports & Exhibition Authority of Pittsburgh and Allegheny County, SEPTA, Philadelphia Housing Authority.
  • Possibilities for expansion - I really think that once we create stubs for these entities, people will expand them. There are lots of sources, and lots of people who follow their local government closely. I know that there are concerns about the decline in new article creation, so here's a big group of articles that are just waiting to be created. There's also a good government and open access benefit by bringing these important entities to the forefront of the internet.--Blargh29 (talk) 22:49, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

Here is a list of Special Services Districts and Municipal Authorities in Philadelphia, PA, taken from the U.S. Census Bureau's Census of Governments documents, with an official URL when available. Do all these examples meet the criteria for notability? If some do not, why not? --DThomsen8 (talk) 02:10, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

• • • • List:
    • Center City District (http://www.centercityphila.org)
    • Frankford Special Services District Of Philadelphia (http://www.frankfordssd.org)
    • Germantown Special Services District Of Philadelphia
    • Manayunk Special Services District Of Philadelphia
    • Old City Special Services District (http://www.oldcitydistrict.org)
    • Pennsylvania Convention Center Authority (http://www.paconvention.com)
    • Philadelphia Hospitals And Higher Education Facilities Authority (http://www.hospitalhighered.com)
    • Philadelphia Authority for Industrial Development aka PAID (http://www.paid-pa.org/)
    • Philadelphia Industrial Development Authority aka "PIDA" (http://www.pidc-pa.org/)
    • Philadelphia Industrial Development Corporation aka "PIDC" (http://www.pidc-pa.org/)
    • Philadelphia Regional Port Authority (http://www.philaport.com/)
    • South Street Headhouse District (http://www.southstreet.com)
      --DThomsen8 (talk) 02:16, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

• Comment. As with any article, these need to have secondary sources for notability. Many of these are of local interest only, and even then only appear as a line item in people's property tax bills. Abductive (reasoning) 02:20, 11 November 2009 (UTC)
• If only the census of governments data will be used, these should be limited to list articles (either broken down by county or by municipality). There is just not enough information in the COG database to create a full-fledged article. There should be no mass creation of stubs. Start with list articles and split off individual articles only when secondary sources are found. --Polaron | Talk 02:34, 11 November 2009 (UTC)
• As I said before, there needs to be 3-rd party sources before any article creation, not just a dump from a primary database. OrangeDog (τ • ε) 12:12, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

Different states have different policies and procedures for creating, pruning and merging these sundry authorities. Some of them are indeed important, and some of the most significant ones are those you've never heard of and which never get covered in the press (remember those levee districts in New Orleans?) However many are moribund, and haven't been heard from because they are supremely unimportant and non-notable. Their position in local government should still be noted somewhere in Wikipedia, but very far from all of them deserve their own stubs. A list or a table created by a bot for each state, or even for each county is fine, and probably necessary (how else would you know which districts guard your own riverbanks or water supplies?) but creating a contentless stub for every authority just creates clutter and hides the forest with trees. Leave the work to human editors. —— Shakescene (talk) 12:28, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

Can we agree that lists rather than stubs are the way to go? If so, would a list like the one I have provided above be a satisfactory starting pattern? An alternative would be to have a table rather than a plain list with the official website URL, as shown above. A table could have more information, but it should be limited to what is available on the U.S. Census Bureau's Census of Governments. However, some of the data there is misleading. The Pennsylvania Convention Center Authority has nothing to do with parks, but the Census of Governments says otherwise.

If there is a consensus here, I will make an appropriate sample from the list above, enhanced with some additional agencies not shown. Can the title be List of Philadelphia County municipal authorities? By this, I am implying individual lists by county. Perhaps this is not the best example, as Philadelphia County and the City of Philadelphia have a combined government with exactly the same geographical area, a unique situation in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. --DThomsen8 (talk) 13:58, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

Lackawanna County would be a better example, where the title would be List of Lackawanna County, Pennsylvania municipal authorities, and there would be a See also from Scranton, Pennsylvania, the largest city in that county. The list for Lackawanna County would include both municipal authorities for the whole county, and municipal authorities for just the City of Scranton.--DThomsen8 (talk) 14:10, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

An example (preferably in userspace for the time being) would be helpful to this discussion, yes. Shereth 15:47, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

User:Shereth, do you agree that lists by Pennsylvania counties would be an appropriate way to go? What about lists with name and URL, or else a table with more information? I prefer the lists with name and URL, as easier to create, at least with my present methods and skills. I can go ahead with two examples, Lackawanna county and Philadelphia county, as sandbox entries for now. If there is consensus, then I would want to move the examples to live articles, complete with categories and talk page templates. --DThomsen8 (talk) 15:57, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

Lists by counties seems to make sense. Go ahead and do a name/url type list as you've mentioned, if someone can think of a tabular format that makes sense that kind of change can be made at a later date but there's no reason to overcomplicate the initial example. This idea is perfectly reasonable. Shereth 16:05, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

That sounds agreeable to me.--Blargh29 (talk) 16:55, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

I would prefer to see some sort of list. I view these lesser governmental agencies much the same way I do elementary schools or local water districts: Sure, you can find all manner of references to them in reliable sources, but most of it is either directory-type information or information which is required to be published by law. Go for a list or merge the content into a "parent" article such as a county or an article about that type of entity, such as Municipal authority (Pennsylvania). Some of these may be "notable in their own right" and should have articles, but those should be hand-created. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs)/(e-mail) 02:16, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

Abolish the silly headers

See also Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Wikipedia Forever. Rd232 ^talk 11:34, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

This very long section has been moved to /Fundraising headers.

"our early fundraising efforts extremely slow (less than 50% from last year)" - Rand Montoya, 17 Nov. [1] Rd232 ^talk 09:20, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

Redesigning the citation errors

I posted this on VP:T, but after it was pointed out that it could be better here, I've decided to redo this, but with a change of plan.

Right now the "errors" are a bit scary looking and don't fit within our system of cleanup tags and such, so I think that for the citation errors that occur inline, we'd do it with the {{fix}} template styled messages, like say or . Of course we could maybe change the colors to be a tad more noticeable or something but still.

Some situations may be better explained using more "cleanup tag" styled messages, like say:

Of course this would be placed at the bottom of the page, but anyway, get the picture? ViperSnake151  Talk  19:29, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

Looks good to me, would be better then my eyes burning everytime I forget to add a reflist.--SKATER ^Speak. 19:37, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

I don't think this last part is currently possible. The current message is "Cite error: There are <ref> tags on this page, but the references will not show without a <references/> tag"; it is generated by MediaWiki:Cite error refs without references. That MediaWiki message does not support wikimarkup, nor do two other messages; see Template:Bug. Wikilinks and the like look good on the MediaWiki page, but don't transclude properly. We might be able to do this if it uses only HTML, but we will have to test this somewhere. Most of the inline errors look doable. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 19:41, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

When I'm less busy, someone should remind me to fix that. Dragons flight (talk) 21:46, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

• Please don't change it. I know that I would probably ignore a template like the one listed, and I suspect many other editors would as well. I would prefer that calling the ref hook added a reference list at the bottom of the page automatically, but that probably won't happen anytime soon. Protonk (talk) 21:37, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

You'd add a banner and 40 words that interfere with reading the article instead of adding a {{reflist}} to an article? Why? --IP69.226.103.13 (talk) 21:48, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

I agree, the whole point of the big red error is that its saying "This is really broken, fix it now." The ambox version loses too much of the sense of urgency by lumping together an actual problem that's typically trivial to fix with more general cleanup issues. Mr.Z-man 23:22, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

The technical issues are one thing, but this argument really gives me pause... there was something about the first proposal that seemed more palatable, for some reason.
— V = I * R (talk to Ω) 05:00, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

Because cite.php wraps error messages in the error class, thus the references will be bold and red. Have to play to see if this can be overridden. I remember fooling with this and it wasn't pretty, but I don't remember the details. I'm not against improving the messages, just pointing out the technical issues, especially since I have had my head in those error messages a lot here lately.

While we are at this, I want to see if the British English versions of the messages can be redirected to the English versions. If a user has British English set as their language, then they see the default cite error messages (along with every other MediaWiki message). ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 23:27, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

OK- ran this on http://test.wikipedia.org. You have to escape the brackets and use an external link:

{{ambox
|type=style
|text=This page contains references, but it '''does not contain a references list''', which is required in order to show the references.<br /> One can be added by adding <code>{{reflist}}</code> under a "References" heading. For more information, see <span class="plainlinks">[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citation_templates Wikipedia:Citation templates]</span>.}}

---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 01:58, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

Stupid question:If we can automatically introduce a banner, can't we also automatically include the references section? --Stephan Schulz (talk) 12:35, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

LOL! Great question! Here's an obvious answer: "of course!" :) i guess that the question should then be: "should we automatically include a 'references' section?" Personally... I'm leaning heavily towards "yes", now that you bring the question up.
— V = I * R (talk to Ω) 15:43, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

I checked it on the test wiki and it will work— we will have to figure out how to suppress the error class that makes the whole references section bold red, but we can probably add something to {{reflist}}. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 17:47, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

IMO, we should still include an error message and tracking category of some sort because quite often the very bottom of the article is not the recommended place for the references section, and we want to make it easy for WikiGnomes to find the problem articles. As for "suppressing" the error class, it may be as simple as putting "</strong>" at the start of the error message (and "<strong>" at the end). Anomie⚔ 18:04, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

My original idea for this was to use fmbox instead so it'd be a bit more, noticable.

Since the category box appears in a similar style, this would look a bit more "flush" into the footer and look a bit more fitting than just jamming an {{ambox}} down there. ViperSnake151  Talk  19:05, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Citation templates doesn't really help here. I would add a section to Help:Footnotes on how to add and style the reference list. I also recommend setting type=warning so that the message is highly visible. I know some just hate red error messages, but a missing reference list is egregious. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 12:49, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

Here is what the message would look like with the warning style:

As to styling the inline errors like {{fix}}: fix and similar templates are really for content issues. Cite errors are an immediate technical problem. For example: "Cite error: Closing </ref> missing for <ref> tag" is caused by not closing the <ref>...</ref> tags, and it can eat huge chunks of the content. Making this look innocuous is not a good idea. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 14:32, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

That looks even more scary than the current one. Why we can't add kinda an "orange" colored level for fmbox to use for stuff like this, I don't want to know. And I meant as in "sorta" like {{fix}}, but maybe in a slightly larger font (like this?) ViperSnake151  Talk  19:33, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

Well, everyone has a fairly good point that these messages probably should be somewhat "scary looking". These sorts of citation errors should scream at you, in order to get them fixed immediately. If the editor who created the problem doesn't know how to fix the problem, or is actually scared by it, then at least the next editor who comes along will fix it (and possibly the originating editor will ask for help). I like the idea of making them cleaner looking personally, but I'm not really supportive of making them "nice".
— V = I * R (talk to Ω) 19:40, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

Exactly. Content issues marked with templates like {{fact}} or {{unreferenced}} are notices; there are articles that have been tagged like this for years. They do their job by alerting readers that there are content or style issues. Cite errors deserve warnings and links to help pages because they can hide content and references. We have several editors who specifically work cite errors, so these messages should not stick around for long. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 19:59, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

I completely agree with the previous two editors. Ergo, no need for banners. Especially since we are talking about messages that are being added via MediaWiki, and should not be added manually at all. Which makes for a sounding "against". Debresser (talk) 20:03, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

Well, I do think that it might be nice to make them look "prettier". It's hardly a pressing concern, in my view, but the plain text error message looks kind of... "ghetto".
— V = I * R (talk to Ω) 20:07, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

Please don't use {{fmbox}}, that's not what it's for at all. You're essentially saying "people see so many amboxes that they're getting banner blindness to them". The solution to that is most definitely not to introduce banner blindness in another set of warning box styles. We have three levels of ambox warning templates because some warnings are "more important" than others. No warning is objectively more important than the ambox series provides for. Are you really trying to say that a missing <references /> tag is more important than a CSD nomination? Reality check, please. Leafing through the collection of template styles until you find one that appears 'suitably scary' completely defeats the point of having a standardised set of warning styles in the first place. Why did you pick {{fmbox}} instead of {{cmbox}}?? That has some similarly-scary warning styles. But the "category message box" is intuitively and obviously not intended for the article namespace. Fmbox is absolutely no different, it is used for interface messages (the ones that appear around the edit screen and on special pages), not for content. Happy‑melon 23:35, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

Missing reference list

Current error message:

Using {{ambox}} styled for content issues:

Regardless of the style, we do need a better message than the cryptic current message. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 14:54, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

Wouldn't it just be far simpler for someone to run a bot which finds these defective pages & adds {{reflist}} at the bottom? The hardest part of this would appear to be writing the query that would compile a list of these pages; the rest could be done by someone with AWB or Huggle, without any special skills. -- llywrch (talk) 20:49, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

Actually, that part is quite easy: the error message populates Category:Pages with missing references list. The reason I haven't added this to AnomieBOT yet is because I haven't felt like figuring out all the myriad variations on the standard naming and ordering of these end-of-article sections. Maybe I'll take a look later on. Suggestions and caveats are welcome. Anomie⚔ 22:15, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

Don't forget to look at WP:LAYOUT as well. I'm not sure which document is more relevant (although I personally tend to give much more weight to non-MOS documents, honestly), but both certainly exist. I thought about doing something along these lines myself, but this is the issue that essentially stalled my development (and "stalled" here is intentional, note that I didn't say "stopped"). Unless I'm missing something obvious, my conclusion is that I need to essentially develop an AI... which is something that I'm slowly in the process of doing. I like AI development anyway though, so I may be self selecting here. :)
— V = I * R (talk to Ω) 22:47, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

MOS:APPENDIX is a redirect to WP:LAYOUT#Standard appendices and footers ;) Thanks though. Anomie⚔ 22:53, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

er...oops.
— V = I * R (talk to Ω) 23:00, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

I am strongly against adding another message box. An error message is just that, and shoud not be mistaken for a maintenance template. Furthermore, I see no consensus in the section above to make such far-reaching changes, rather to the contrary, so I don't understand why this subsection was started in the first place. Debresser (talk) 16:05, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

The current message is not informative. I linked Cite error, but I suspect it is being overlooked. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 16:56, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

Better idea

If you think "scaring" users on the page itself is not a good idea, why not configure the edit filter to be able to detect these things and display a suitable message? ViperSnake151  Talk  00:07, 15 November 2009 (UTC)

Is there a Special page or category or something to list pages in this error state? Pseudomonas_(talk) 10:43, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

There is Category:Pages with missing references list and Category:Pages with incorrect ref formatting. Which, incidentally, are rather shockingly large right now!
— V = I * R (talk to Ω) 19:28, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

Adding a missing list

One can modify the missing <references> error message to actually add a references list. It would be at the end of the page, but might be better than nothing. Dragons flight (talk) 15:17, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

Seems like the way to go. To me.

Wikipedia messages seem never to be in least declarative sentences:

"The references will not show unless you add a {{reflist}} or <nowki></nowiki> to this article."

Still, a bot that adds one is better, imo. --IP69.226.103.13 (talk) 02:12, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

I don't mind which of those two options are chosen. Doing it with an ambox is definitely not right though. Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 20:23, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

Syntax coloring on .js and .css pages

It would make editing such pages (ie. monobook.css, monobook.js) easier if there were color-coding, as most coding environments have. As such the colors would need to show up even during editing, in the text box, rather than only when viewing the page.

I know this isn't a major area of concern, but it would be a minor convenience, if it wouldn't take too much effort to implement. Equazcion (talk) 21:53, 12 Nov 2009 (UTC)

That's about the same deal as having syntax highlighting for editing wikitext. I think the Usability people are working on that, or were at least considering it at one point.

Personally, I just use It's All Text! to load it in a real editor when necessary. Anomie⚔ 22:17, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

WP:WIKIED. --King Öomie 15:35, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

Hide project banners of inactive WikiProjects

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section. A summary of the conclusions reached follows.

Discussion here has dwindled. Therefore I have moved it to Template talk:Inactive WikiProject banner. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 21:05, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

---

We have many WikiProjects which are inactive (see Category:Inactive WikiProjects); some never even got off the ground. Some of them have project banners which take up space on talk pages. If the project is inactive then the assessment data is not being used either. So I propose to hide these banners, by blanking their banner templates. The code and assessment would not be removed from talk pages, so the banner can easily be resurrected in the future if the project becomes active again. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 22:58, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

easy support. –xeno^talk 22:59, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

I can see people removing the banners if nothing is visible... --Izno (talk) 23:04, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Along the same lines, I can also see someone deleting them if they're blanked. A <noinclude>ed note explaining the situation would be better than a blanking to solve that. Just a minimal banner rather than none might solve Izno's concern:

(which could probable be done easily enough through {{WPBannerMeta}} by adding an "inactive" parameter) Anomie⚔ 23:23, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

Hiding works for me, though why not just remove them or delete them. Most inactive ones that have been inactive more than a few months generally stay that way. -- Collectonian (talk · contribs) 23:09, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

Question Are we just going to blank the banner visually, or are you also proposing to remove the code that places those articles into categories? The box blanking is easily revertable. The deletion of thousands of now empty categories is a little more difficult. If a project is later revived, the recreation of previously deleted catagories could result in a mess at CfD. Jim Miller ^{See me | Touch me} 23:10, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

Why not just remove the banners, particularly if the project has been inactive for say 2 years, 1 year? There's no point in project banners on a talk page if a project is inactive. --IP69.226.103.13 (talk) 23:19, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

(to Collectonian and IP69xxx) Many particularly unnecessary edits to remove a short piece of code, and also the project can't be easily resurrected if we do that. –xeno^talk 23:21, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

I still think they should be removed if the project has been inactive for any reasonable length of time. I wouldn't say it's unnecessary to de-spam a talk page, and they shouldn't be left in place merely to facilitate the hypothetical resurrection of a project. PC78 (talk) 23:45, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

The project can be resurrected in the usual way, just get a bot to add the banners again, or save a list of the pages to the defunct project page. --IP69.226.103.13 (talk) 00:10, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

I see no reason to do anything about them. They might lead to the Project being restarted and they might remind people to replace them with teh banner of a parent project. I do not see that removing them improves wikipedia so why do it. --Bduke (Discussion) 00:03, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

I don't see how having banners to 3-year-old never active projects improves wikipedia. I see how it can make wikipedia an uninviting and confusing place for a new user, though. And that is, imo, reason to delete them. --IP69.226.103.13 (talk) 00:10, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

I have no problem with the removal if: a) there is still an active project banner on the page, and b) attempts are made to merge the inactive project to an appropriate parent project. I just removed over 600 banners from a defunct project that was converted to a task force of its parent project. Conversion is preferable to outright deletion, especially regarding the categories on those talk pages. Jim Miller ^{See me | Touch me} 00:25, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

I'm okay with upmerging or finding a different task force, first. AIDs can go to medicine, etc. I don't understand a, though. It seems you're saying okay to remove the banner if the banner is left? Oh, you mean if any banner from any project is left on a page? I think that's the most frustrating thing for someone who comes to wikipedia and wants to engage in discussion about a talk page for the first time, click on a project banner, post there, then get ignored forever. I don't see the benefit, if that's what you mean. --IP69.226.103.13 (talk) 00:37, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

How about hiding the bulk of the banner so it says "This article was part of defunct project Foo, to discuss what should happen to the project go to WP:Projects for disucssion. " then people would have the choice depending on concensus:

• Request removal of banners at WP:BOTREQ
• Restarting the project
• Up-merging to Project Bar with or without keeping the granularity info (|project was = Foo) either by [[WP:BOTREQ], redirecting the banner, or making one an expression of the other.

Rich Farmbrough, 05:59, 13 November 2009 (UTC).

(Or what Anomie said) Rich Farmbrough, 06:58, 13 November 2009 (UTC).

Thanks for all the comments on this. I agree that it would be a good idea to show something along the lines of what Anomie suggested, as just blanking the template would likely cause some confusion. So here is what I think I will do:

• Instead of adding a new parameter to {{WPBM}} I think it would be simpler to write a new template (e.g. {{Inactive WikiProject banner}} or perhaps a new subtemplate of Template:WPBannerMeta for this.
• The template should use the same parameters as WPBM, so to mark a template as "inactive" all one has to do is replace WPBannerMeta with WPBannerMeta/inactive (for example).
• The output will be just one row (like Anomie suggested) both in full display and in its collapsed form inside a banner shell.
• The word "inactive" could be linked to somewhere appropriate, so that editors can get more information about what it means.
• The actual template page will also explain what has happened and how to reactivate it. It could also show what the template used to look like to save people looking through the history.
• I don't see support for mass removal of these banners, although I think we should make it clear that editors can feel free to remove them locally on a page-by-page basis if it is deemed appropriate.
• Wikipedia:WikiProjects for discussion is an interesting idea, but I think that it is relatively rare for a wikiproject to be discussed and so Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion should suffice.

— Martin (MSGJ · talk) 07:28, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

Okay, {{WikiProject Elvis Presley}} is the first guinea pig. You can see how it appears outside and inside a banner shell. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 08:25, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

They look find. I still think, especially for projects that never did anything but post banners, the banners are just clutter, but I'm fine with collapsing to one line since there appears to be consensus for that. --IP69.226.103.13 (talk) 08:44, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

Good idea, but it would be even better if the 'inactive' banners could be removed altogether after a certain period of time. One year? --Kleinzach 09:37, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

Personally, I would oppose this move. To my eyes, it would make far more sense to try to deal with the essential problem of an inactive project, which is what to do with the project page itself. In general, the best way to deal with that is to see if the group can be turned into a taskforce of some larger group dealing with the same area. If that can be done, then there clearly would be no problem in having the banner of the new parent project in place of that of the older project that has been turned into a subproject. But, in at least some cases, these inactive projects may be the only ones that really deal directly with certain articles, and I would very much regret seeing the removal of a banner if in so doing the possibly sole existing assessment of an article is also eliminated. John Carter (talk) 15:51, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

• I prefer the "Inactive" styling per Anomie and {{WikiProject Elvis Presley}} / Martin's example. I am concerned that without showing that a project has existed, that is by deleting the banners entirely from talk pages, a second project might inadvertently be started with a slight variation of the project name. Unlikely but still possible. Further, calling attention to inactive status via the banner and link might help revive a dormant project. Sswonk (talk) 16:07, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

• Some of these inactive projects amount to a week's worth of work by one person. Someone made up a project name, got a template, added it to 50 articles, then disappeared. A second project inadvertently naming themselves similarly is not going to impact anything, it seems. If it is, please elaborate, because I don't understand the concern. --IP69.226.103.13 (talk) 20:22, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

• Using hypothetical, illustration-only names, suppose "WP Battletown" is inactive and the banner is removed from talk pages. A year later, without realizing the first exists another editor begins and recruits different members for "WP Battletown, Texas". The new user has created new banners, userboxes, project subpages, categories and so on. Then, the creator of "WP Battletown" returns from a 16 month hiatus and sees the new project. Both see a duplication of effort and waste of time that would have been avoided if the second editor had simply seen the "Inactive" banner and taken over for the first. Page merges, page moves and history merges might all be forced when they could have been avoided by leaving a vestigial, "Inactive" banner on Battletown related article talk pages. As I wrote, it is unlikely but possible that this might occur. Sswonk (talk) 22:13, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

• To me, that's just way over-hypothetically worried. I think that happens once in the history of wikipedia and it's the only thing that ever bothers those constituents it's just not going to matter, particular, if instead of two inconvienced-because they're careless sorts you settle for 5000 inconvenienced because they're new readers, possible editors. --IP69.226.103.13 (talk) 05:29, 15 November 2009 (UTC)

• Note that for "2 hours of work by 1 person" never-got-off-the-ground projects, there's always WP:MFD. Anomie⚔ 01:57, 15 November 2009 (UTC)

Thanks. --IP69.226.103.13 (talk) 05:29, 15 November 2009 (UTC)

• Support Inactive Template Nice job Martin. I like this better than removing them outright. Editors interested enough in a topic to be spending time on the talk pages are at least given the chance to see the inactive link, and hopefully click through. The best result is to reactivate some of these projects. The next best idea is to get them merged into an active project. I also agree with Sswonk that the re-creation of these projects is work that doesn't need to be done. By maintaining the historical WP, interested editors can get a project back into active status. Jim Miller ^{See me | Touch me} 16:37, 14 November 2009 (UTC)
• Comment: Would a single banner specifying multiple inactive WikiProjects (when applicable), rather than one banner for each inactive project be better? –Whitehorse1 20:31, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

  It might be, if such a banner could tolerate the multiple revisions it would receive fairly regularly, with the related changes to the talk pages that the inactive banners are placed on. Just remember, every time someone tries to reactivate a project, they will want their separate banner restored, with the material removed from the inactive banner. For those projects which are, basically, seriously dead, like perhaps a group for a musical act that hasn't had anything notable happen to it in years, such a banner might be useful. But I think the amount of busywork related to changing it as people activate and deactivate projects might be more trouble than it's worth. John Carter (talk) 20:42, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

  That seems to be a lot of work for little (if any) real gain, to me. The inactive banner is already "collapsed", for one thing. Many of these will already be within {{Wikiprojectbannershell}} templates as well.
  — V = I * R (talk to Ω) 20:44, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

  A benefit would be compactness, cleanliness, Ohms. As said at the start "Some [inactive projects] have [b]anners which take up space on talk pages", which they (poss. multiple banners) still do irrespective of being collapsed or not. Edit: See below for more on this. –Whitehorse1 21:12, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

  The big problem with that idea is that all the talk pages transcluding the now-inactive project's banner have to be edited to swap in your multi-project inactive banner. With the current proposal, only the now-inactive project's banner itself need be edited. Anomie⚔ 01:57, 15 November 2009 (UTC)

I fully support the 'display as inactive' proposal. We kill three birds with one stone: first of all, we declutter talk pages and assessment categories. Second, we avoid losing valuable data. Whether or not a project is active, the placement and extent of its project banners represents a huge amount of effort, labour, and valuable metadata. It is actively damaging to WP to erase that data by removing project banners from talk pages; there is absolutely no need to do so other than vague notions of tidyness. The more of the infrastructure of a wikiproject remains, the easier it is to restore and revitalise. Leading to point three: by presenting a banner marking the project as inactive, we let the banners fulfil their original purpose: as advertisments for the project. There is nothing more disingenuous or demoralising to follow a link from an upbeat project banner, to the dead shell of a wikiproject. Even worse is when editors fail to notice the project's inactivity, and join it anyway, only to realise at a later date that it's totally dead. If a project is marked as inactive, editors who follow its links are actively encouraged to take on the task of reanimating it, which can only be a good thing. A very promising development all round, I'd say. Happy‑melon 21:12, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

Good third point, I had not considered. Still, for the make-an-effort and never get anywhere wiki projects, deletion would be better in my opinion. --IP69.226.103.13 (talk) 05:29, 15 November 2009 (UTC)

• (Follow-on/expansion from above on single vs. multiple "Inactive" banners.) There are two banner-shell templates: WPBS, and WPB. WPBS is normally used when up to six banners are present, otherwise WPB is used. The difference between the two is that WPBS—which is much more common of course—defaults to displaying a one-line summary of each WikiProject banner, while WPB defaults to displaying only a "[show]" link. Although it's possible for the defaults to be overridden to hide/show or expand the one-line summaries, the ordinary aka default outcome of the current proposal means anything up to six one-colored-bar summaries (containing "Inactive") for articles using WPBS. –Whitehorse1 21:53, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

Is this a problem? Unless a page is inactive (or over-archiving) you need to page down to get to any recent content anyway. I usually find that the most recent comments aren't on the first screen of a talk page anyway, or there aren't any comments at all. Either way, the use of the screen real estate for banners isn't something I have ever thought of as a negative. Jim Miller ^{See me | Touch me} 22:21, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

• Could we not just give the banners a css class that hides them? although I would prefer something that makes it go slimline and basically says "<WP Name> (inactive)". Peachey88 ^{(Talk Page · Contribs)} 00:04, 15 November 2009 (UTC)

  A CSS class to allow people to hide them via their personal CSS file (or possibly via a gadget, if anyone cares to write one) wouldn't be a bad idea. But hiding them by default would run into the same problem that blanking them would. Anomie⚔ 02:00, 15 November 2009 (UTC)

And does nothing for the new editor who does not realize that lots of wikiprojects go nowhere and isn't going to blank them. --IP69.226.103.13 (talk) 05:29, 15 November 2009 (UTC)

• I would support something like an |inactive=yes parameter in the metabanner (or a fork at /inactive) which would tell you that the project is inactive, with a link to a general guide (yet to be written?) on what to do and how to do it when a project is inactive (upmerge, convert to taskforce, revive). I'm not convinced that different colors are needed, or that they should be minimized. If it's a clutter, {{WPBS}} or {{WPB}} should be used anyway. Headbomb {^ταλκ_{κοντριβς} – WP Physics} 17:23, 17 November 2009 (UTC)
• I'd like to see inactive projects' banners dimmed slightly, along with the current denotation method seen on, e.g., Talk:Cirque du Soleil. Powers ^T 03:40, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Sub-pages for Village Pump

What does everyone think about using sub-pages for the village pump? for those of you that may not be immediately clear on what I'm talking about, I'm asking about using a system similar to the AFD/RFA pages, where each individual discussion takes place on it's own page but is transcluded onto the main page (so that readers can see all conversations at once).
— V = I * R (talk to Ω) 12:24, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

You mean have a page like Wikipedia:Village pump (all)? PC78 (talk) 12:45, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

You might as well wait for LiquidThreads, which is on its way Real Soon Now (tm). --Cybercobra (talk) 12:53, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

It's a good idea, but ANI is in much more dire need of this than Village Pump. Changes occur so frequently there as to make watchlisting almost useless in keeping track of individual discussions. I haven't found that to be so quite as much here. Addendum: It would be more practical here, though, since things happen more slowly here, and more by experienced users, so posting instructions for creating and transcluding subpages might be more acceptable. The ability to watchlist individual discussions here would be a major plus, even if ANI is a relatively more dire issue. As for LiquidThreads, it's only been in live testing for a couple weeks now, and in my opinion still has a long way to go before being implemented at Wikipedia. Equazcion (talk) 13:06, 13 Nov 2009 (UTC)

What are liquid threads? It would be nice even simply to have threads, you know, like every other discussion forum on the Web has been using for the past few decades... --Kotniski (talk) 13:30, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

See here for an example (its "beta" feedback page). A developer (User:Werdna) is working on just that sort of thread system as an extension to MediaWiki, which he calls LiquidThreads. When completed it will hopefully be implemented in place of the current wiki discussion system, ie. on all Talk: and other discussion pages. Equazcion (talk) 13:42, 13 Nov 2009 (UTC)

Man, I'm literally waiting for a LiqudThreads(LT) rollout on en.wikipedia with "baited breath". that being said... I'm not positive that a page(es) such as the Village Pump would actually directly benefit from being converted to use it. The discussion pages certainly should be converted to use the LiquidThreads system, but I'm not sure that the mainspace page(s) should do so. Maybe it's therefore a good thing that I brought this subject up prior to the eventual LT rollout here... (or not, who knows. I'm not that egocentric!). For the "proposals" and "policy" sections, at the very least, I would think that it would be desirable to keep the... er: "formal" statements as "normal" wikitext. It's possible that I'm actually conflating/anticipating the rollout of LiquidThreds in this proposal, somewhat; after a rollout we would then have the page and an LT driven discusion page for each "thread" on the Village Pump, after all.
— V = I * R (talk to Ω) 14:21, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

Unsure

I don't know that we'd need subpages here. It makes sense for AfD and RfA to have a consistent location to link to and for archiving purposes, but this is essentially a talkpage for all intents and purposes. I don't think there's anything to be gained by splitting discussion up unlike everything else of this nature. ~ Amory (u • t • c) 13:39, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

The gain in my mind is the ability to watchlist individual discussions, which would mean having to check the main page less often manually for changes to a discussion of interest. Equazcion (talk) 13:47, 13 Nov 2009 (UTC)

They would also be useful in loading at computers with slow conections, a single thread would be much more quick than the entire village pump. It may also prevent edit conflicts made by users who didn't really intend to say something in the thread, but instead start a new one by opening the last and adding a title header. MBelgrano (talk) 14:11, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

Yes, and manual/bot archiving might not be needed either (though the two advantages mentioned previously are far more significant). Hope they can get this working soon (as far as I can tell it really is just reinventing the wheel of standard threaded discussions, so maybe it won't take too long...)--Kotniski (talk) 14:40, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

well geez... I (or anyone else) could technically implement this change right now (ie: within 30 minutes) to all of the Village Pump. It's extremely easy for any of us to implement... the fact that it's that easy to implement and that it's not currently used gives me significant pause, is all. If no one really objects I'm certainly be more then happy to go forward, but my last attempt to do this wasn't so smooth (politically) so I'm being a bit more pragmatic in this case.
— V = I * R (talk to Ω) 15:50, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

You have my support. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 15:55, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

(edit conflict)Well I for one object. It just seems to be excessive slicing and dicing. This kind of approach makes sense for AfD and RfA - they are constantly changing pages where discussions are only relevant for a certain period of time, and direct, nonchanging links are required. The Village Pump is entirely different in setup, and is much more akin to a talkpage of an article. It wouldn't make sense to use a subpage approach for article talkpages, so why do it here? Moreover, RfA and AfD are really process pages, where this is most definitely not. Issues with watchlisting specific discussions are outweighed in my mind by an inability to watch this page in general. ~ Amory (u • t • c) 16:02, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

You could still watch this page for new discussions, as whenever a new one starts, another transclusion would be made. Village pump can be thought of as a talk page, but if so then it's a talk page for all of Wikipedia; As such it carries a group of discussions that are much more separate from each other, with a much higher degree of individual appeal (people likely being interested in one discussion but not necessarily another), than any article talk page. Equazcion (talk) 16:10, 13 Nov 2009 (UTC)

Yea, I've seen this argument before, and I don't quite understand it (meaning, I do, but...). I want sub-pages because it makes watching both the main <whatever> page and the specific sub-pages easier. It's easier to me... but maybe that's because I know what to expect?
— V = I * R (talk to Ω) 16:18, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

Amory, compare it to WP:AfC where we used to have all submissions going on one page. It is a lot easier to keep track of things now with everything being on a separate subpage. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 16:27, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

I'll second that objection. I for one commonly read pages on my watchlist via the diff rather than by the actual rendered text, as it makes it much easier to not miss new comments. I sincerely hope before LiquidThreads is released that it gives the option to get one big diff of all the threads since a particular time/revision, as otherwise I am going to be extremely annoyed at having to dig through myriad little pages trying to find out what new comments have been posted. There's certainly no way to avoid that with a subpage-transclusion scheme. Anomie⚔ 18:10, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

Really though, it's easier to track everything with individual sub-pages (to me, at least). As Equazcion mentioned above, you watch this page for new discussions and tag interesting ones (or remove uninteresting ones) from your watchlist (I actually use separate lists with page links, utilizing the related changes tool, but it amounts to the same thing).
— V = I * R (talk to Ω) 05:36, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

Except for how often an originally-uninteresting discussion here on the Village Pump becomes interesting (often for Chinese values of "interesting") due to topic drift. Anomie⚔ 01:36, 15 November 2009 (UTC)

Previous discussion

Previous discussion on topics of this nature: archive 50 and archive 41. Initiated by the same person in each case, but the discussion from archive 50 has a good deal more in it. Just bringing these cases up. --Izno (talk) 16:05, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

Thanks! reading...
— V = I * R (talk to Ω) 16:18, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

no, no, no... the conversation that you linked to in archive 50 at least, is discussing documents within the Wikipedia namespace in general... which is an idea that I don't support myself. Having separate documents for (for example) Wikipedia:Naming conventions and "naming conventions (insert topic)" is a good thing (which is a particularly relevent topic by the way, considering that several of them were recently merged!).
— V = I * R (talk to Ω) 16:25, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

The discussion contains a relevant proposal. Hence, it would be time-profitable to take the ideas and arguments used in that discussion and apply them here. :) --Izno (talk) 16:28, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

Hey, good point... re-reading. Again, thanks!
— V = I * R (talk to Ω) 16:46, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

Partial implementation

I don't think the entire page needs subpages, however I do think when there is a seriously long threads, like the header and spoilers ones, they should be moved to subpages to save the watchlists of those not interested in them or only interested in them. -- Collectonian (talk · contribs) 22:18, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

Eh... the half implementation compromise solution would only create a mess. It would very likely confuse many, if not most, discussion participants, and it would kind of mess up the archiving. I think that we're stuck with either full implementation or nothing.
— V = I * R (talk to Ω) 05:23, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

I don't think it really would cause any confusion, since the edit link would go to the transcluded pages, the same as now...its done at ANI and the other admin boards now. I don't know how they deal with it with archiving, though. -- Collectonian (talk · contribs) 05:27, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

Well right... the archiving with a sub-page/transclusion system is essentially automatic, since pages are started on a log/<date> sub-page already. If only some are done that way though, then it doesn't really work out. Actually... I'm not really certain how we could manage using sub-pages for only some conversations. Someone would just manually have to create and transclude the sub-page to the appropriate regular VP page. I just think that it would be messy and confusing.
— V = I * R (talk to Ω) 05:44, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

• The way Collectonian suggest we do it is the way it used to work when the village pump had very high traffic. The issue about archiving is also not important for two reasons. As long as the section on the village pump is edited like this or replaced with a link to the new page archival integrity is maintained. That said, way back when we never retained archives of the village pump longer than a week, so it isn't actually that big a deal. I'd suggest splitting discussions off and making them sub-pages of WP:CENT when they grow too big, and just leaving a link to the discussion behind. That's what WP:CENT was created for, in some respects. Hiding T 10:24, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

  I think that this reply actually hits home on the real issue, in my mind. The disparate nature of the discussion forums on Wikipedia is bothersome, to me. WP:CENT is probably a net good kludge, but the fact remains that it's a kludge. The underlying technology of Wikipedia is very good for building encyclopedic content, but the fact is that it's a lousy platform in terms of community participation/discussion. I think that I've come to the conclusion that there is no good solution here, using what currently exists on the platform.
  — V = I * R (talk to Ω) 13:24, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

  The disparate nature bothers me too. I'd support merging most of the noticeboards and other central discussion areas into the village pump, so that we have "village pump (incidents)", "village pump (administrators)", "village pump (edit warring)", "village pump (arbitration)" and so on. That way, it might make future organisation better, and allow sections to split off to (topic) sub-pages rather than /topic, which would perhaps make organisation a little easier and allow continuity of discussion. Hiding T 14:40, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

Transcluded

Well, whatever the merits of this as a general proposal, I've moved the two very long threads we had on this page onto subpages - they seemed to be affecting the usability of the page as a whole. --Kotniski (talk) 11:28, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

I've transcluded the "Abolish the silly headers" sub-page back onto the main page. It was moved to a sub-page due to it's length causing accessibility/performance issues. I'm not positive about the impact (or rather, the lack thereof) of transcluding the content like this. If it's still a problem in terms of accessibility/performance, then please feel free to change it back to a simple link.
— V = I * R (talk to Ω) 13:22, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

Yes, I did that. I guess there must be many people with slow links like my current one - transcluding the content is just as bad as having it on the page.--Kotniski (talk) 13:28, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

I mean, there's the advantage that you don't get the changes showing up on your watchlist if you're not interested in the thread - but many people will see this as a disadvantage, since they won't notice that the page is transcluded, and will think they're watching the conversation when in fact they're not (that's a general disadvantage of transclusion, I think, and means it should only be used on pages where transclusion is the norm). With huge threads like this one, we just want them off the page so that other people can continue to use it for other things.--Kotniski (talk) 13:32, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

OK. Like I said, I wasn't sure, so it's good to know. I do agree with the other points that you've made, incidentally.
— V = I * R (talk to Ω) 13:46, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

Yeah, for something like ANI where you have a LOT of threads, and most of them are very specific to a few people, it makes sense, but here were you often want as many peoples' input as possible, it's best to just have a single page to watch. ♫ Melodia Chaconne ♫ (talk) 15:13, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

I moved this here off of the talk page, since it seems that we're talking about the wider use of su-pages and transclusion now. Personally I don't buy that view that sub-pages somehow limit wider participation. If there's anything to really support that viewpoint other then speculation I'd really like to hear about it. Interestingly to me though is that I've seen the opposite argument made as well, that sub-pages allow too much participation. I don't think that it really makes a difference myself, but I do think that sub-pages make managing the different threads easier, and it certainly makes linking to and tracking individual discussions much easier.
— V = I * R (talk to Ω) 16:10, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

Change archival methodology

What about changing the archival methodology used across the Village Pump? I can envision a system where all discussions are begun on the main Wikipedia:Village Pump page and then aggressively archived to sub-pages. The existing bots can relatively easily archive discussions to sub-pages which create dynamic page names.
— V = I * R (talk to Ω) 14:31, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

Wiktionary_Hover: a JavaScript on double-click

Wikinews proposes a script to display the Wiktionary definition in a small board, when one double-click on a word. It's already been installed in the following Wiktionaries gadgets: in French and in Italian.

To add it here, we should vote for an administrator, in:

1. MediaWiki:Gadget-dictionaryLookupHover.js, copies without the guillemets : "importScriptURI('http://en.wikinews.org/w/index.php?title=MediaWiki:Gadget-dictionaryLookupHover.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript');"
2. MediaWiki:Gadgets-definition, adds "* dictionaryLookupHover|dictionaryLookupHover.js"
3. MediaWiki:Gadget-dictionaryLookupHover, describes the gadget.

JackPotte (talk) 23:01, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

To explain: this script is a javascript tool which will retrieve the top definition for a word based on the language of the website the word is on, and the user's language preferences. The following user languages are natively supported: Spanish, Russian, Italian, French, English, Dutch. Other user languages will default to English until they are fully supported.

The script is currently available as a gadget or via common.js on many WMF projects; a good example is at fr.Wikinews where it is installed so everyone can use it.

The tool is particularly useful for readers who are not native speakers of the website's language. - Amgine (talk) 23:15, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

Fantastic tool. I don't see why we shouldn't turn it on. Fences&Windows 02:25, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

I agree. Count me as a !vote for immediate implementation.
— V = I * R (talk to Ω) 05:40, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

Not working for me. Screenshot of what this does? --Cybercobra (talk) 13:31, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

Here is a screen clip of the tool in use on a blogspot blog: clip. The blog is in English, and the user preferences are in English, so the definition returned is English. Here is a screen clip of the tool in use on fr.wikinews: clip. The website is in French, the user preferences are in English, so the definition is the French language entry from the English Wiktionary. - Amgine (talk) 15:25, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

As long as it does not function like the script at nytimes.com article pages (example) where, if you either click&drag-to-highlight or doubleclick-to-highlight a word, a small question mark link pops up, and prevents me (in firefox) from using all normal right-click functionality (copy, search google, etc). -- Quiddity (talk) 21:27, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

This script corresponds better to my needs than the http://nytimes.com one, I just invite you to test it individually, by copying my User:JackPotte/monobook.js, into yours. JackPotte (talk) 14:31, 15 November 2009 (UTC)

Today, it's used by at least 13 sister projects. JackPotte (talk) 20:42, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

When a new(ish) user creates an article, default to preview and show WP:LUC

Some of the problems that wikipedia creates for people in "real life" emerge from the fact that so many people come here to write articles about themselves without having a clue how this place works. Crappy autobiographies (or articles on companies) then get taken in hand by experienced editors, and sometimes the result is real distress. If the person or company isn't notable, the article can get deleted, but it takes time to make that happen. The incidence of these situations might be reduced if new users who create a new article have to see a preview screen that shows WP:LUC before they can finally save/create the article. As things stand, WP:LUC is entirely ineffectual: there is no way a new user is going to see it.

This is my first post at the pump; I don't see this one at Perennial Proposals, but please feel free to set me straight if I'm not doing this correctly. Nomoskedasticity (talk) 17:15, 15 November 2009 (UTC)

This is literally earlier on this page already. Check #Force preview before saving for new users. --Golbez (talk) 17:17, 15 November 2009 (UTC)

I did see that. I trust it's clear that what I'm proposing is different, in its application only to creating new articles. Nomoskedasticity (talk) 17:22, 15 November 2009 (UTC)

Sounds like a good idea to me. Applying this to all non-autoconfirmed users might help. Fences&Windows 17:50, 15 November 2009 (UTC)

Can anyone guess my position on this? Are we up to 7 of these "restrict IP/Newby" proposals now in two months? I've lost count. Please, next time someone has this idea- think about how you would feel if a bunch of editors kept proposing to limit your ability to edit/create/move/etc! Would you like it? If you think you are more "reliable" or a "better" editor than an IP or newbie, what gives you that idea? We are all equal unless as an individual we show we are not reliable. Assume good faith. Trying to limit an entire group of editors is wrong.Camelbinky (talk) 21:30, 15 November 2009 (UTC)

Who said restrict? I said: offer some helpful information they're not going to get otherwise. Nomoskedasticity (talk) 21:49, 15 November 2009 (UTC)

"Forcing" is the same as restricting in my eyes if the "forcing" is done only to those in a certain group (newbies or IPs). Wikipedians learn by doing, you do not need to read a "rulebook" before editing. Yes, newbies might make a bad article or a non-notable one; itll get deleted, and they'll get contacted on their talk page; hopefully the learn. In no way should anyone have to read a single policy/guideline prior to editing. It is in fact specifically stated in many places that ignorance and violation of policies or procedures does not negate a good faith edit (or a proposal or creation of a new template or wikiproject, etc).Camelbinky (talk) 22:16, 15 November 2009 (UTC)

Wikipedia's approach at the moment is like putting a big sign on the front door of the sweetshop next to the school "Come And Take One"... "Slap! Not that one, you eejit, it says so in the terms and conditions on our website". That's how newbies often end up getting treated, because they're not given enough information up front, nor enough indication that they really need to take certain information on board which is available buried somewhere in often not terribly newbie-understandable terms. In a perfect world, there'd be a handholding clueful, nice editor with lots of time ready to deal with each newbie edit appropriately. Can't see that happening any time soon, so exploring other solutions is absolutely a sensible thing to do. Rd232 ^talk 22:59, 15 November 2009 (UTC)

(edit conflict)WP:LUC is at best a restatement of the text underneath the edit box. At worst, it can be largely irrelevant and WP:BITEy. Any editor shown that page who doesn't feel they have a COI could reasonably be assumed to take offense. ~ Amory (u • t • c) 22:17, 15 November 2009 (UTC)

If the problem is them writing about themselves or putting in links about the company they work for then I'd support having a warning about common problems put on IPs edit pages. LUC does not seem a particularly helpful bit of text and it is far too long. You want something that is very short and shows the basic sort of things to avoid assuming they are editing in good faith. Dmcq (talk) 12:15, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

The proposed solution to this problem—defaulting to preview—will have zero effect, except possibly to annoy good faith new contributors. If this problem actually needs a policy solution, then a better approach would be to modify the default Editnotice that IPs and new users see to include something about this. 72.95.238.235 (talk) 16:16, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

Perhaps a softer approach would work:

Add a few questions that must be answered before non-autoconfirmed people can create articles:

• Is this article about you, someone you know, or a company, place, school, organization, or other thing you are part of? _[yes] _[no] [show/hide link labeled "explain this"]
• Is this article entirely in your own words, and is it referenced clearly enough that people won't think you are making it up? _[yes] _[no] [show/hide link labeled "explain this"]
• Is this article ready for publication or do you want to save it as your user name:article name and come back to it later? _[yes] _[no] [show/hide link labeled "explain this"]

This first question's "explain" text would include links to WP:LUC, WP:BLP, WP:COI, etc. The second would link to WP:COPYVIO. The last's would link to an explaination of user space.

Depending on what the user checked, automated messages with more details would be put on his user talk page. If he checked the last one, the article would be renamed user talk:USERNAME/ARTICLENAME before being saved, and instructions to move it added to the user talk page. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs)/(e-mail) 02:27, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

I think it is better to warn people before they write anything than to get to a preview and then warn them. Dmcq (talk) 12:37, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

Opt-in advertising (not covered in perenneal discussion)

My proposal is that during a month every year, users are given the option (via an unobtrusive link or button next to the donate button, for example) to have advertising included in their Wikipedia experience. This would be an opt-in system, and users could potentially go so far as to be able to select which companies they were willing to receive advertising from.

I hope any people who read this will be able to appreciate that this proposal might overcome the previously stated reasons for rejecting advertising. If a user indicates that they are willing to view specific advertising, then it is hardly likely that such advertising will give them the impression that Wikipedia is commercially influenced. Moreover, advertisers would not be able to use their advertising money to influence the site administration, as the burden of selecting advertisers would be on each individual user, not on Wikipedia its self.

The reason I'm making this proposal, which to many might seem like just another advertising proposal, is that I'm too poor to contribute financially to Wikipedia, but if I were given the option, I would certainly be willing to spend a month of each year with an impaired Wikipedia experience, if it meant I could finally be contributing something financially to this great site.—Preceding unsigned comment added by Mjbat7 (talk • contribs) 19:00, November 15, 2009

Yes. —Noisalt (talk) 01:04, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

Not even....-- Collectonian (talk · contribs) 01:28, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

Hmm... hell, if I can opt-in to give the foundation a few extra bucks not out of my own pocket (and probably covered by ad blockers) then why not?--Unionhawk ^{Talk E-mail Review} 01:32, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

An ad-blocker would generate neither an impression nor a click, so that would be pretty useless to opt-in in that case. –xeno^talk 14:44, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

You wouldn't get a large number of people opting in, so you wouldn't get much money. The reason people talk about advertising is that we have so many hits that we could make billions from ads. An opt-in would only really apply to Wikipedians, not regular readers (who don't log in), and that latter group is orders of magnitude larger than the former. --Tango (talk) 01:40, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

Well, we could allow all users the option by having it remember the advertising preference for a users ip address. Otherwise, users could select their advertising preference for each individual session. I don't know if the current setup for the site would allow this, but I would imagine it wouldn't be too hard to implement? --Mjbat7 (talk) 10:06, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

I'd have the preferences stored by cookie rather than ip address for those not using usernames, other than that it sounds a very reasonable proposal. Interesting, I wonder if the difference with people who switch on the ads would translate to a particular segment for advertisers. Anyway I support the idea. I'd want to be sure also there was no way pressure from advertisers could affect content. Dmcq (talk) 20:37, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

Oh yea, cookies would be better. how does one implement things like this though? --Mjbat7 (talk]) 13:02, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

The usual way would be to provide a box and include some script for someone like google to put stuff and then every so often they give you some money. We'd just make inclusion of the ad spac optional. Hmm I can see people arguing over which crowd to team up with to provide the ads. Dmcq (talk) 01:17, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

Yes, it's in WP:PEREN. Stifle (talk) 09:17, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

Of course advertising is covered there, but it doesn't cover the possibility of optional advertising being discussed here, which in my opinion seems to overcome most of the objections usually raised to advertising in wikipedia. --Mjbat7 (talk) 12:05, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

I'd be happy to give it a go. SunCreator (talk) 14:11, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

It still creates the situation where advertisers can threaten to withdraw their advertising and thus withhold income from the WMF. Even one such event will call our neutrality into question. Pseudomonas_(talk) 14:18, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

I'm sure prominent box at the top of such an advertiser saying "This advertiser threatened to remove support for Wikipedia unless content was changed therefore please check all content for neutrality and bias in favour of the advertiser" would deter any such advertiser. :) Dmcq (talk) 14:35, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

Or, less intrusively, we could just take the same stance as WP:NLT: if they threaten to withdraw their advertising unless we do or don't do X, we preemptively drop them as an advertiser until they officially withdraw the threat. Anomie⚔ 16:57, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

Indeed. Moreover I think advertising real estate on wikipedia would be of such value that we would hardly be at a loss if any given advertiser were to withdraw sponsorship. Wikipedia can function just on the contribution of users, and so we would not be at a significant loss if advertising revenue was threatened. The thing is, voluntary contributions may not always be enough, and so advertising revenue could be saved up for a rainy day, or for special projects. Such a system would ensure that at any given moment we would not be at any important loss if all our advertisers decided to walk away all at once, or more likely, if we decided to walk away from them. --Mjbat7 (talk) 12:07, 24 November 2009 (UTC)

Wikipedia data extraction

An WP:RFC is being drafted on how to organise data on Wikipedia better, to enable easier organisation/maintenance and data extraction. Comments/contributions please on constructing the RFC. See WP:VPT#Infobox Template Coherence Proposal. Rd232 ^talk 11:16, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

Featured content stars for featured pictures

Asian Golden Cat
Scientific classification
Kingdom:	Animalia
Phylum:	Chordata
Class:	Mammalia
Order:	Carnivora
Family:	Felidae
Genus:	Catopuma
Species:	C. temminckii
Binomial name
Catopuma temminckii (Vigors & Horsfield, 1827)

You know how featured articles and featured lists are marked with a gold star in the corner? Let's mark featured pictures too so they're easier to find. Currently, readers either have to browse the featured content galleries or else click a lot of thumbnails to find featured picture needles in the content haystack. Here's an example of how hard it is to tell a featured picture from a non-featured picture at a glance. Several editors at Wikipedia:Featured picture candidates have a proposed solution.

• It can be hard to guess at thumbnail size which image is higher quality
• 
  not featured 536 × 380 pixels, 61 KB
• 
  featured 8,359 × 5,800 pixels, 39.02 MB

Add a small featured star to the caption box near the featured picture. This communicates at a glance that the image meets the site's highest quality standards. Featured pictures hold up to viewing at close scrutiny, and can be suitable for monitor wallpaperand other purposes. At left is an example of a featured star in a taxobox. Below is an example of how the featured picture star would look in an image caption.
The featured picture stars would be implemented and maintained by bot. We think this would make it easier to see and enjoy the site's best content. Bringing the proposal to the wider community for discussion. Durova³⁶⁶ 20:42, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

I am something of an anti-star curmudgeon (I don't like seeing FA stars floating around on user pages and all over the place) so you'll have to take my opinion with a grain of salt, but personally I find the solutions presented above to be distracting. FA stars on articles are, at least, somewhat inconspicuous and take up relatively little in the way of real estate; the above stars are intruding on templates and captions and to be honest seem inelegantly pasted in. I also would have some concern as to whether or not the addition of graphics into areas of templates where graphics might not be expected has unintended (and unwanted) consequences in terms of template formatting. So, the short answer is, I'm no fan of the idea but it may be just me. Shereth 21:04, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

I'm a featured pictures regular, so you'd expect me to support this, and I do. I think that the little stars are unobtrusive, and do the reader a service by signalling that the image really is worth their time. It improves the reader experience at very little cost. Mostlyharmless (talk) 22:07, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

I have an honest question here. I am curious how knowing which pictures happen to be featured improves the typical reader's experience? I'm not trying to question your statement but rather just trying to understand the point of view presented here, since I am having a difficult time seeing the material benefit of indicating, at least within articles, when an image has been selected as "featured". Shereth 22:33, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

(To Shereth)- I can only speak for myself, but as a "photo-illiterate" who has to rely on others for photos/pictures for articles I create/work on, I often go to other articles and "steal" their photos for my new articles (to represent that existing article name on a new list article, or if I need a photo to represent a particular town and there is a geologic formation in that town with an existing article and photo). If I need a photo and I can tell at a glance which photo is a FP that would help me use the best one for my new article. That is just one example of what this star can help with.Camelbinky (talk) 23:13, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

@ Shereth: It will increase curiosity and hopefully bring people into the project, get them to donate their photos, and maybe even nominated some FPs. I became a member of the project because of some of the beautiful images that were promoted to FP status, and only because I stumbled across some in articles (at first I didn't get the connection between FPs and POTD). Unlike articles though, images can be used in many places, so some rather non-descript articles may have some hidden treasures (which needn't be so hidden if the star were added). My amatuer interest in photography led me to take part in the process and since joining FPC, I've uploaded more than 600 photos, four of which are FPs. Durova is also working hard at getting donations from educational institutions; the opportunity to get on the Main Page sometimes opens up difficult-to-get-at collections. upstateNYer 00:51, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

Thank you for your replies. I am sympathetic toward those who put a lot of time and effort into creating/uploading images and graphics for use in Wikipedia - I've uploaded over 13,000 on Commons, mostly via bot and mostly graphics as opposed to images but I feel I have a certain amount of sympathy nonetheless. I'll chew over some of this information for a while and see if I come up with some additional insight but I appreciate your responses. Shereth 03:34, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

• A featured star would alert viewers which of these views well at full size
• 
  not featured
• 
  featured

• Strong support with inclusion of infobox stars as well Couldn't have said it any better than Durova, and now that we have a way of getting the star in infoboxes, no FPs will be left behind. upstateNYer 22:24, 16 November 2009 (UTC)
• I like the idea but agree about screen real estate. It would be nice if one could use CSS trickery to place the star overlapping or on the image (with possibly some ability to set which corner it should be by), but then I worry that for some images, the star could become too distracting. --MASEM (t) 22:30, 16 November 2009 (UTC)
• Strong support per UpstateNYer and Durova.Camelbinky (talk) 22:33, 16 November 2009 (UTC)
• "too so they're easier to find." is a poor argument, given that there are other methods to do so. I'm not going to go hunting for featured images by hunting through articles... It also draws the eye away from the image, unnecessarily so, and Masem's idea would simply obscure the image in question in some part. These are enough to draw me to oppose the proposal. --Izno (talk) 22:42, 16 November 2009 (UTC)
• Support except for the infobox implementation. I find it to be obtrusive as used in the example infobox. The thumbnail view is great since that would be unused space next to the caption anyway. Great feature in an article with multiple angles or views of the same subject. Let's the reader know which one may be the best one to view at full-size. Jim Miller ^{See me | Touch me} 22:46, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

• This is a more palatable solution to my curmudgeonly resistance to these stars. I'm still not in support per se but if it has to be implemented I would prefer to see this solution :) Shereth 22:48, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

• I don't mind one way or the other about this little star, but if it is "hard ... to tell a featured picture from a non-featured picture at a glance", why is the featured picture project of use for Wikipedia, in which images are generally only viewed at a glance? Fences&Windows 22:58, 16 November 2009 (UTC)
  • There can be times when editors want to view an image in detail. Featured pictures hold up to careful viewing and scrutiny. Durova³⁶⁶ 00:09, 17 November 2009 (UTC)
• Support as a good way to encourage more good quality photographs in articles and reward editors that produce them. I think some more tough could be put into how the start is displayed - an overlay on the image might make it clearer that it is the image that is being "starred" and might work better in the info box example too. Is there any equivilent for "good articles" status for images? rannṗáirtí anaiṫnid (coṁrá) 23:40, 16 November 2009 (UTC)
  • WP:Valued pictures is essentially the equivalent to GA. upstateNYer 00:57, 17 November 2009 (UTC)
• I am pro highlighting featured images, but I'm not sure about the best approach. I'd consider adding a star as an overlay on one of the corners (though this may work poorly for some images). Or one could do something totally different like adding a gold border to the image frame rather than adding a star. Dragons flight (talk) 23:59, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

• oppose - The majority of people who will see those stars (anons, and regulars) will have no idea what the stars are and can lead to confusion, especially when they click on it thinking the star would do something (as might a regular website)b. The current article stars are okay because they're hidden way up in the top corner, but this is right within the article. Perhaps this can be implemented as a gadget for those who see it as beneficial. -- penubag  (talk) 00:37, 17 November 2009 (UTC)
  • This argument has already been brought a couple times at WT:FPC and the response has always been, "then what do those anons and regulars do about a star in the top-right corner of an article?" It's the same thing. upstateNYer 00:51, 17 November 2009 (UTC)
    • I think the star at the top of an article is okay since it's out of the way and necessary to exemplify featured articles. But I personally think it's distracting to have stars in the middle of an article to point out "featured here and there" parts, and unnessary. One of the criteria for a featured article is that is is properly illustrated with images, and adding featured pictures help the final product get renowned. It seems unprofessional to single out good works within an article and advertise them. Shirley, Encyclopedia Britannica, or any encyclopedia doesn't engage in such practice. The image summary featured templates are good enough.-- penubag  (talk) 01:05, 17 November 2009 (UTC)
      • I dont know what Shirley does in her encyclopedia (Airplane reference, get it?), but for your Enc. Brit. comparison- we arent paper, we can, and often do, do more than an encyclopedia can, we arent limited to doing only what "real" encyclopedias do. That really isnt an argument that can be used against this proposal. Paper encyclopedias dont have templates, infoboxes, wikiprojects, categories, talk pages, and alot of other "shiny things" that we can have being internet-based. This is another thing that helps us make a better encyclopedia, that's my two cents.Camelbinky (talk) 03:26, 17 November 2009 (UTC)
      • Camelbinky pretty much said what I would have. As for your first sentence, what makes FPs any less noteworthy than FAs? An FA being illustrated is completely unrelated to FPs; it's nice to have FPs in an FA, but not required or even expected. Noting that an image is an FP with a star gives the project some needed press and may cause some new users to start donating their images and nominating good content (not all editors build text content, wikignome, etc - some limit their contributions to image-related tasks; why lose a potential contributor because of an argument over a star in a caption?). It's like when you first discover FA as a new user: "Wikipedia has standards? Gasp!" upstateNYer 04:58, 17 November 2009 (UTC)
        • What makes an FP less noteworthy than an FA? Nothing, but the images are being presented in an article, so if the article displays a star for being featured, it's okay. We are not reading images, and if we are, the featured star exists on the file description page, which is where it belongs. If "it's nice to have FPs in an FA, but not required or even expected" then why showcase it just when they are??? Camelbinky only talked about one of my points which I admit was poorly crafted, so I retract that statement. Your second point about "lose a potential contributor" is like the argument for having image placeholders which has been rejected by the community. Also, another comment, if this proposal passes, why not have featured stars on featured quotes from Wikiquote? I would love to see that happen. -- penubag  (talk) 06:08, 17 November 2009 (UTC)
          • Identification of quality images serves the same function as identification of other content, such as articles: to get the attention of potential contributors who could donate material at a similar level. The New York Times ran a piece last summer about Wikipedia's need for better media content, which profiled a successful professional photographer who has contributed a featured picture.[2] To highlight only the featured articles doesn't help to improve the media side, since most featured pictures appear within articles that aren't featured. Few individuals are skilled at both media and text contribution; featured articles often display images that are merely adequate. There's even been a problem with non-media editors replacing featured pictures with lower quality images. It's usually done in good faith; they just don't realize the difference. Durova³⁶⁶ 18:18, 17 November 2009 (UTC)
          • Just as much effort is put into getting an FP as an FA, trust me. The time commitment and the number of gigabytes of photos that I don't nominate or upload is large. As for your wikiquote reference, I'd have no problem with that, but note that you're talking about a completely separate project whereas FP is a WP project. And I didn't know the image placeholders had been poo-pooed by the community; I use them all the time and think they're a great idea! upstateNYer 22:32, 17 November 2009 (UTC)
            • I was just going to comment that I also never realized image placeholders werent "allowed", I missed that memo.Camelbinky (talk) 02:57, 18 November 2009 (UTC)
• Oppose - Maybe at some point WP can become more of an encyclopedia for readers and less of a repository for signs and symbols of behind the scenes social activity? --Kleinzach 02:17, 17 November 2009 (UTC)
• Support. I get the feeling that some of the opposes are on the basis that this is merely project-cruft. However, high quality pictures that illustrate articles in highly encyclopedic ways are important to the project. Wikipedia:Feature Pictures places high premium on the "encyclopedic value" of an image in illustrating particular articles - being merely pretty or high quality is not enough. Wikipedia's Featured Pictures are ones that add considerable value to articles, and thus are likely to be images which readers are likely to get value from in looking at more closely. For this reason having a small and unobtrusive marker is going to improve the encyclopedic experience of readers. Mostlyharmless (talk) 02:38, 17 November 2009 (UTC)
  • Fair enough. Can the star be made 'small and unobtrusive'? --Kleinzach 02:44, 17 November 2009 (UTC)
    • I would say the the star is already 'small and unobtrusive'. If this encourages editors and readers to submit more images and allows users to quickly find good images, I would think it is an excellent idea. Definite support. NW (Talk) 03:12, 17 November 2009 (UTC)
• Support. I find this rather uncontroversial. Having a star on the page isn't going to detract from the quality of the image, nor can I see it confusing new users. We already have this for other featured content, so I'm fine with this. PeterSymonds (talk) 03:16, 17 November 2009 (UTC)
  • Do you find the images to be linked inline with the text in every instance? Say, everything linked to Barack Obama? That is the equivalent of what will be done here, in my eyes. How would you not find that obtrusive? --Izno (talk) 04:24, 17 November 2009 (UTC)
    • Would you mind elaborating? I'm having trouble understanding your meaning here. Just to cover the base, the plan is to have the stars link to WP:FP in all instances (though you may very well not be referring to that link; again, I was unclear on your statement). upstateNYer 04:58, 17 November 2009 (UTC)
• Strong Support — raeky ^{(talk | edits)} 06:07, 17 November 2009 (UTC)
• Fairly obvious support. Wikipedia is known for its crap photos and this may go some way to correcting that problem (by encouraging new photos and keeping crap ones out of articles that already have FPs). MER-C 07:05, 17 November 2009 (UTC)
• It gets my support too, following on from Mostlyharmless' comment. A wee star saysclick me, and just like the FA star, it tells you you'll be rewarded by spending some time with the content you find when you do. Per MER-C, images on WP are increasingly underrated, under-employed and overlooked, and this may well prove a key element in reversing that trend. mikaul^talk 07:35, 17 November 2009 (UTC)
• Strong Support When you compare the amount of space advertising "featured articles", the little start is quite minimal. It is also part of a necessary emancipation of the illustration.. remember, a picture paints a thousand words and, many of our articles are overly verbose.. GerardM (talk) 10:23, 17 November 2009 (UTC)
• Would there be a way to replace "" in thumbnails of FPs with a slightly flashier version - maybe gold background on the larger rectangle, rays, or superimposed star on larger rectangle? No extra screen clutter, easily differentiable for people who are looking for it, and would signify that it's the magnified version that's special. Pseudomonas_(talk) 12:32, 17 November 2009 (UTC)
  • We thought of changing that but it would require actual code changes to the wiki, there isn't a template anywhere that would work for that. Then again it's possible to create a custom image box template for FP's that would do as you say, unfortunately that would also be beyond the abilities of us that created the template and proposed the idea. — raeky ^{(talk | edits)} 16:06, 17 November 2009 (UTC)
• Oppose The reason to add this feature is sound and I support it. However, as was stated on the first discussion about this in WP:FPC, this proposal can only works if the star is added through an entirely automatic process (such as "picture has FP tag -> auto include of star whenever picture is included in a page" which would be very tricky to do). Many pictures are featured and some are delisted every week, and all pictures may be included in several places, so ensuring that the star is displayed for the right pictures everywhere is a huge work. Failing to do this properly will merely make this star meaningless, with many thumbnails of FP lacking it, and some thumbnails of delisted pictures having it. Soon, misinformed people will start to add it to any picture they find pretty. Therefore, until someone propose a way to deal with this problem, I oppose the creation of this template which will otherwise probably be misused and then misunderstood. Ksempac (talk) 14:05, 17 November 2009 (UTC)
  • Part of the closing process (specifically for delisting) could be adding/removing this from pages, generally FP's are not on _lots_ of pages but only a one or two or three rarely more. It wouldn't be that much more of a burden. The bot would just ensure that it's not being used anywhere it shouldn't along with catching pages that a FP is used on later. — raeky ^{(talk | edits)} 16:06, 17 November 2009 (UTC)
    • An understandable worry, but easy to resolve the same way featured articles and featured lists get managed. A bot would update the displays per the featured picture templates. So other than coding the bot, this doesn't create any more work for anybody. Durova³⁶⁶ 18:01, 17 November 2009 (UTC)
• Support. Some kind of tag to indicate a featured picture would be fine, so long as it is not too intrusive. Surely a bot could take care of the maintenance? How are the featured article stars done? Fences&Windows 15:13, 17 November 2009 (UTC)
• Definitely. As far as I can tell, the worst-case scenario brought up here is that readers will be confused, click on the link, figure it out, and the either a. go "Okay" and get on with their lives or b. get interested and start editing. Where's the downside? ~ Amory (u • t • c) 16:39, 17 November 2009 (UTC)
• Support. I didn't even know WP had such a thing as featured images until I started reading WP:Signpost. Our featured content (and to a lesser degree our "good" content) is supposed to represent our best material, and we should try to make readers aware of that. --RL0919 (talk) 17:26, 17 November 2009 (UTC)
• Support - Definitely. We give lots of praise and kudos to the people who work on FAs, but not so much for featured images.--Unionhawk ^{Talk E-mail Review} 17:30, 17 November 2009 (UTC)
• Support outside of infoboxes. I'm not convinced from the example above that they look good inside them. --SarekOfVulcan (talk) 17:54, 17 November 2009 (UTC)
• Weak support for this outside of infoboxes as well. I've given it some thought and while I still find them mildly obtrusive I doubt they would do any harm. I wish there was a more elegant way to perhaps replace the symbol with something indicative of the featured status but that is merely nitpicking on my part. However I will still oppose the inclusion of any graphic symbol within infoboxes, as they do funky things to the formatting and are more than a little intrusive in appearance in these instances. Shereth 18:27, 17 November 2009 (UTC)
• Support, reasonable proposal. Rather uncontroversial addition to the website. –blurpeace ^(talk) 20:12, 17 November 2009 (UTC)
• Support but not in infoboxes Great idea, it helps readers to find the best of Wikipeda images. It looks confusing in the taxobox-what's it linked to? Let's leave them out of infoboxes, though. --IP69.226.103.13 (talk) 20:43, 17 November 2009 (UTC)
• Note If a bot is going to be used to maintain these, it should be easy for the bot to only add the star for images where the file name is located within [[ ]] brackets, and ignore those without. That would skip any image located in an infobox. Jim Miller ^{See me | Touch me} 21:02, 17 November 2009 (UTC)
• Comment. Maybe it's just me, but I don't have a problem with how the star looks in the infobox example. --RL0919 (talk) 21:05, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

• Looking at the image above, I don't know what the star is related to. It does not appear, in the infobox with the cougar, that the star is related to the image, but rather that the star is related to the species in some way. Even in this discussion about stars on featured pictures, and knowing exactly what FA and FP stars look like, my first thought was that the star means it's an endangered species or maybe one taken off the endangered list. I want stars on featured pictures in articles, I think it's a great idea, past time to have them. But I don't want to confuse readers, ever. Impossible to reach that goal of never confusing a reader, so I'll settle for eliminating the worst confusion. When I see something that is so confusing, that I'm not sure what it is even when I know what it is, this is, imo, something that may confuse more users than it provides any utility for. --IP69.226.103.13 (talk) 22:52, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

• Support We do this for other featured content types. — Jake Wartenberg 23:09, 17 November 2009 (UTC)
• Conditional support In thumb boxes, it looks ok. But I agree with those who find it out of place in infoboxes, and I just can't see how it would not look even more out of place on the other types. Anomie⚔ 00:42, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

Thiodina puerpera
Image of a female Thiodina puerpera
Scientific classification
Kingdom:	Animalia
Phylum:	Arthropoda
Class:	Arachnida

• Support - both infoboxes and thumbs. A star below an infobox image would not look obstructive if there's a caption provided, such as the one on the right. Maybe the FPC process can imply the requirement of captions in infobox FPs, which would also merit the EV an image needs to be featured. ZooFari 01:18, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

• Now it even more appears to be saying the species is rated star for some reason, removed from endangered list would be my guest. My second guess would be the taxon's article is a featured article. The problem is, imo, it appears to belong to the taxon, not to the image. And, I like the idea of attaching the stars to featured images in article space to let users know they're special. But I don't like the idea of attaching stars that don't appear to be for the image. In addition, adding the star to the taxobox will require input from the biology projects. --IP69.226.103.13 (talk) 01:56, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

• Oppose - Readers only care about the content of articles (and images), not about those internal mechansms of wikipedia. They care about if the article is complete, clear, well-written, etc; and if images are of good quality and related to the topic, or not. Being featured, however, is only of community concern. The star can be considered a self reference (by being an addition that isn't related with the article at all), but having no text and being at a corner the problem is so small it can be ignored. Those others, however, would be in the middle of it all. Second, have in mind that internal links to featured articles from other articles make no distinction when they link featured articles, there's no underline, bold text or gold link instead of blue. Why should images be any different? And third, an image is featured or not by itself. For an article to be well ilustrated, the image must be related and ilustrative of the topic, not necesarily a featured one. For example, let's say there's an article that talks about an old war: a portrait about such war, even if available at a low resolution, would be far better than a photo of a sunset in the beach where the armies once landed, even if that sunset is a featured image. MBelgrano (talk) 02:26, 18 November 2009 (UTC)
  • Actually you're overgeneralizing there. Just like an article can't be featured without images, an image can't be featured without being in articles. Encyclopedic value is what makes WP:FPC different from Commons:FPC. upstateNYer 03:29, 18 November 2009 (UTC)
    • Wikipedia Featured Pictures places a very high premium on the encyclopedic value of the image in illustrating a particular concept with specific reference to the articles. Unless it relates to the text that surrounds it, it won't be featured. WP:FP isn't pretty pictures - they do that at Commons:FP. WP:FP is about illustrating the encyclopedia with the best images. Mostlyharmless (talk) 02:28, 19 November 2009 (UTC)
• Generally support but reasons for opposes need to be taken into account before implementing. See User_talk:Durova/Archive_73#Implimenting featured picture stars easily for a couple of ways implement this automagically. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs)/(e-mail) 02:42, 18 November 2009 (UTC)
  • I like that idea. Though (as others have said), I'm really not sure about for infoboxes. Pseudomonas_(talk) 10:02, 18 November 2009 (UTC)
• Oppose in Infoboxes As others have commented, it would not sufficiently clear to the uninformed what the star applies to, possible misinterpretations including the infobox itself or its subject. Also wastes a slight amount of space if no caption is present for the infobox image. --Cybercobra (talk) 06:39, 18 November 2009 (UTC)
• Regarding taxoboxes one of the most encyclopedic uses of high quality images is species identification. Wikipedia's photographers have been doing amazing work in that regard, for example with birds and flowers. It would be a real service to readers to have a cue available when the lead image is that useful. Durova³⁶⁶ 19:05, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

  The concern is that the star does not appear to indicate the picture is featured, when it's in the taxobox. Even coming here to discuss this, knowing that's what the stars are, my first thought was the pictured cat had been moved off the endangered list or something.

  So, if the star is not a cue to the image being featured, but leads to confusion about the status of the species, then it's not a cue about the lead image. --IP69.226.103.13 (talk) 07:47, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

• Oppose because it doesn't add value. Rather it adds confusion. Rich Farmbrough, 21:41, 18 November 2009 (UTC).
• Support. Linking the star to Wikipedia:Featured pictures reasonably clarifies any kind of confusion. A bot to monitor them would be good, too. Dan ☺ 21:57, 18 November 2009 (UTC)
• Oppose Not needed, and causes confusion. I'd rather we start working on improving the encyclopedic content more than adding small features as golden stars in infoboxes for images. warrior4321 22:04, 18 November 2009 (UTC)
• Oppose. It's metadata, and original research, since there is no independent confirmation of the value of the image. If we want to clue readers on whether it's worth clicking through, add the dimensions in the title attribute.--Curtis Clark (talk) 14:37, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

I've added an endangered species with an image star. It looks like the star is attached to the IUCN red list category in some way, and about the same with a caption or without. Adding this to taxoboxes will require input from biology editors, also. They should be notified of this discussion. Also fossil organisms have age ranges, add the star to the trilobite taxobox with its fossil range to see that it doesn't appear to indicate it's a featured picture. Yes, clicking on it takes you to the FP page, but, it still starts out with confusion. --IP69.226.103.13 (talk) 07:50, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

Barbary Lion
Barbary Lion
Conservation status
Extinct in the Wild (IUCN 3.1)
Scientific classification
Kingdom:	Animalia
Order:	Carnivora
Family:	Felidae
Genus:	Panthera
Species:	P. leo
Subspecies:	P. l. leo
Trinomial name
Panthera leo leo

Note Due to the proposal to add the stars to taxoboxes I posted a request for input at the taxobox template discussion page, and at wikiprojects Tree of Life, Animals, Plants, and Fungi. --IP69.226.103.13 (talk) 08:34, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

Alternate implementation

I don't think that the core of this idea is bad, but I think that it's clear that the proposed implementation is lacking somehow. I was just thinking that a good solution would be to use the "Designated Metadata Area" (if that's actually a term) that the current featured article start uses, and to use a different graphic (a graphic of something like a photo would seem to make sense). If the Featured Photo appeared anywhere on a Featured Article then both icon would appear.
— V = I * R (talk to Ω) 13:13, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

This makes the most sense. I'm going through this page thinking "caption areas? infoboxes? Thats ridiculous!" Why would these appear anywhere except on the File: namespace for the photo. We don't put stars in the infoboxes or next to the links of featured articles, why should we with featured pictures? - ʄɭoʏɗiaɲ ^τ _¢ 17:04, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

Possible Solution to Ambiguity

There is really nothing to prevent the community from decreeing that the star for FPs be the same star as for FAs. If we had a featured image star that looked unique, it would solve all three different ambiguity concerns that I have seen above. Nezzadar ^[SPEAK] 16:12, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

Only for established users who know what the conventions are. For the regular user who just uses Wikipedia as a website, it'd just make things that wee bit more confusing, unintuitive, and excluding. Pseudomonas_(talk) 16:27, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

I don't know. That might work. Can you offer a suggestion, a logo about an image that makes it seem the image is unique? I do like the idea of cluing the user in to the quality of the image, particularly since if it's a featured picture it's usually a large file, and, when it's not, it's usually a very important image. This makes finding an image, particularly when it's not your specialty, easier. --IP69.226.103.13 (talk) 19:32, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

Subdividing for clarity

It appears that most people support the use of featured picture stars in captions and a smaller number support it for infoboxes. In order to clarify matters please state your opinion in one of the following sections:

1. Support implementation of featured picture stars in caption boxes and in infoboxes.
2. Support featured picture stars in caption boxes only.
3. Oppose any use of featured picture stars.

Support implementation of featured picture stars in caption boxes and in infoboxes

• Per above. Durova³⁶⁶ 22:35, 18 November 2009 (UTC)
• As I said above, I think this is a good idea and I don't see a problem with having it in infoboxes. --RL0919 (talk) 22:37, 18 November 2009 (UTC)
• Ditto RL0919 upstateNYer 03:45, 19 November 2009 (UTC)
• Support In both places. — raeky ^{(talk | edits)} 09:07, 19 November 2009 (UTC)
• Support - if the infobox is required to have a caption under the image. Comment - why are we turning this into a vote? We should at least use bullets instead of numbers...--Unionhawk ^{Talk E-mail Review} 13:51, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

  I went ahead and changed the numbered lists in the sections to bulled lists, to keep this as consensus, not voting. I still don't like dividing this into sections, but it's a little late to undo that, at this point.--Unionhawk ^{Talk E-mail Review} 13:56, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

  Hmm... opposers are quite convincing... going Neutral.--Unionhawk ^{Talk E-mail Review} 14:01, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

• Support -- ZooFari 23:04, 19 November 2009 (UTC)
• Weak support This should be judged based on its value to readers (if this is aimed more at editors or some other narrower audience, we can seek another method, like categories or something). My reason for thinking the stars may help readers is that they give an idea of whether it is worth bothering to click on a thumbnail link to see a larger image. But I agree with many of the oppose comments about self-references and self-congratulation and clutter not helping readers, so this is a weak support verging on weak oppose. Kingdon (talk) 15:26, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

Support featured picture stars in caption boxes only

• Strong, strong oppose - This would be troubling. All FPs should be treated fairly. One of the reasons for stars is the motivation of nominations, and potential FP contributers would be motivated to contribute their images in thumbs only. Taxo bars are what we consider high EV images and we don't want to lower that bar. ZooFari 23:29, 18 November 2009 (UTC)
• Support I find the white space created in the taxobox to look awkward, and the star is not clearly linked to the picture in that location. I also don't agree with the proposal to add a caption in the infobox to fill the white space. Any picture in an infobox should already match the title bar, and a caption would be redundant. They work well in the thumbnail frame, and should be used there. Nothing says that the best picture is going to be most appropriate for the infobox anyway. That one should contain one that will be most recognizable to the reader, whether featured or not. Jim Miller ^{See me | Touch me} 00:24, 19 November 2009 (UTC)
• For what it is worth, this is not my preferred solution; I actually have a preference for the below option (oppose all stars), however, for the sake of cooperation and compromise I am willing to support this version. I am still quite opposed to any addition of such stars to infoboxes. Shereth 05:54, 19 November 2009 (UTC)
• Support --Cybercobra (talk) 06:35, 19 November 2009 (UTC)
• Although, leaning toward the below option, as it is hard to communicate to supporters just how inappropriate they look and how confusing their addition to taxoboxes would be to readers. They're too confusing in the taxobox. --IP69.226.103.13 (talk) 07:50, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

Oppose any use of featured picture stars

• Oppose any use of featured picture stars in article space. Stars linked to internal Wikipedia processes are 'self-referential'. They shouldn't be used in the encyclopedia per se. Nor do I agree that "most people support the use of featured picture stars" (above). The opposition is considerable. How about setting up a thorough-going centralized discussion to see what support this really enjoys? Reg. --Kleinzach 23:19, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

  I note that stars for featured articles and featured lists appear in the mainspace. Anywhow, I agree that the discussion should be fully publicized considering how much input it has already drawn and the diversity of opinion. An RfC with placement on WP:CENT should do the trick. --RL0919 (talk) 23:27, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

  Article stars are a different matter since they appear outside the body of the article; they are as much part of the article as donation banners. If this feature is implemented, we'll have articles literally peppered with stars. mgiganteus1 (talk) 11:05, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

• Strongly oppose featured picture stars. The stars are disproportionately flashy, potentially confusing in meaning (especially in the taxobox), and most importantly, do not improve the encyclopedic merit of the article in any way. The image is already there; it's doing its job regardless of whether a star's next to it. What problem is adding these stars meant to solve? Is there a flood of complaints that unmarked featured pictures are detracting from users' experiences? The point of every Wikipedia article is to present information. Let's keep out unnecessary distractions to that goal, and high-quality images can attract attention to themselves on their own merits. -- Yzx (talk) 09:32, 19 November 2009 (UTC)
• Strong oppose Distracting and unnecessary. Woefully inadequate as a way of highlighting quality images in an article, because the number of FP-like images on Wikipedia is very many times greater than the number of official FPs, and this will always be the case. mgiganteus1 (talk) 11:00, 19 November 2009 (UTC)
• Oppose in article space. What next, stars next to article links? Hesperian 11:03, 19 November 2009 (UTC)
• Oppose - weakly for thumbnail boxes, strongly for infoboxes. It's all distraction and clutter that bit-by-bit makes Wikipedia less intuitive. Pseudomonas_(talk) 11:07, 19 November 2009 (UTC)
• Urgh, this is hideous. FA stars are tucked away in the Designated Metadata Area(TM) in the top-right corner, not actually within the main content pane. This is self-referential and a gaudy advertisement, and implementation would be an emormous undertaking. Would that people stopped obsessing over their stars - it's bad enough that people feel the need to tart their home pages up with so many silly boy scout badges without this creeping any further onto articlespace. That said, I would not be opposed on principle to Pseudomonas's suggestion in the general comments section that the "click to view me full size" icon in thumbnails could be overloaded in some way for FIs (certainly not with a flipping star though), but not in infobox templates.—Preceding unsigned comment added by Thumperward (talk • contribs) 12:51, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

  I'd kind of thought of something like but less ugly (that was hacked up in 5 min). Personally I'd be happy to shelve this until MediaWiki allows a parameter for overloading the images - then we could also maybe overload for disputed images &c. Pseudomonas_(talk) 13:17, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

• Oppose I don't personally have strong feeling about this, but I think that the oppose commentary here makes for a fairly convincing argument. It's probably a good idea to bring some attention to featured pictures (and other featured content), but this doesn't seem to be the way to go about it. I find the "self-referential" and "not in the content pane" arguments offered above to be particularly compelling.
  — V = I * R (talk to Ω) 13:05, 19 November 2009 (UTC)
• Oppose All the featured content within Wikipedia should be treated the same. We don't add stars to everyplace that a featured article or list links in other articles. The thumbnails in the articles are links to the picture page and from what I have seen, the picture page has the star in the upper right hand corner (like articles and lists) but it also has a banner on the page stating it is a featured picture. We do not need to add additional star everyplace that it links. ~~ GB fan ~~ ^talk 13:24, 19 November 2009 (UTC)
• Oppose, self-congratulatory and kindergarten-ish. Readers can't be expected to dig through our back-office processes to understand what it means. Changing the color of the little magnify symbol would be a more aesthetically pleasing option if this is felt necessary, but I don't think it would be a positive step in any form. Christopher Parham (talk) 13:43, 19 November 2009 (UTC)
• Oppose in article space . An image can be valuable to one article, while being unsuited or even misleading in another. Having the star in article space may give the sometimes false impression that the image is the one best suited for that particular article. Melburnian (talk) 13:48, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

  Good point, Melburnian. --IP69.226.103.13 (talk) 20:09, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

• Oppose Swayed by good arguments of opposers. Self-referential; obscure; distracting; clutter. --Cybercobra (talk) 19:35, 19 November 2009 (UTC)
• Oppose. Classic example of original research: no independent evidence of notability.--Curtis Clark (talk) 03:28, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

  ...huh? not that I disagree with the !vote, since I opposed myself, but... Original research? notability? What does that have to do with anything here?
  — V = I * R (talk to Ω) 13:28, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

  If someone were to add a Wikipedian with many barnstars, many newly created articles, and hundreds of thousands of edits, but who was not notable outside Wikipedia, to a "List of people in Wherever" article, it would rightfully be reverted, since there is no independent evidence of notability. If a bunch of Wikipedians formed a project to issue a list of the ten best English-language movies of the year, based not on external reviews, but on their own opinions, it's hard to imagine they'd get much support to put it in mainspace. How are featured pictures any different?--Curtis Clark (talk) 14:58, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

  Humm... I don't have any real issue with the Featured Article or Featured Picture process myself. Labeling them as OR isn't really accurate or helpful here though, since the processes themselves are not really what's at issue here. Let's not overstate our case here, and start an argument about something that is really tangential to the proposal. We're hardly going to develop consensus to deprecate those processes out of this discussion, after all.
  — V = I * R (talk to Ω) 16:43, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

  You asked him to explain his reasoning, and he did. He's not starting an argument, nor does he give any appearance of trying to start one or get rid of the FP or FA processes. --IP69.226.103.13 (talk) 17:00, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

  I have no quibble with having FA or FP, nor do I disagree with the concept of barnstars: All are ways to encourage quality, cooperation, and all the other good things that make Wikipedia work. On the other hand, elevating the identity of the awardees to encyclopedic content seems counterproductive.--Curtis Clark (talk) 18:00, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

  I disagree that it elevates them by using them in article space. I find it helpful to know an article is a FA or an image is a FP because I know it has received some level of scrutiny higher generally than regular articles. (The FP I admit is more about size and technical issues and poorly about EV, but I still find FP more useful, often, than non-fP.) Still, I see you have valid concerns, because of my ()al remark about FPs. --IP69.226.103.13 (talk) 18:06, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

  I'm just trying not to be confused here, because I am, and we're essentially on the same "side" so that's not a good situation. There seems to be a rather fundamental viewpoint difference here because I don't see FA or FP evaluations as an "award" at all. Classifying them together with barnstars at least sheds some light on the original question that I had about this, but it only creates a new question. There are people that take personal pride in "getting an article to FA" status, and Durova clearly takes pride in doing the same with images. That's great for everyone because ultimately the encyclopedia wins all the way around. The editors are motivated to (continue to) contribute, and the content is vastly improved. However, the FA or FP "award" ultimately belongs to the article or file in question, not the article. So... again, I hardly begrudge the !vote since I'm !voting the same way, but this position concerns me because it seems to be a repudiation of the whole "featured content" system itself, and I don't want to support that.
  — V = I * R (talk to Ω) 19:46, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

  But you're not supporting any particular other vote by voting the same. Whatever reason you vote, is simply your reason. If someone else votes the same way as you, but for a different reason, there's no assumption that you adopted their reasoning. I've not even heard of that, so I may be wrong about what you seem to be saying. Others' reasons for their votes don't accrue to you when you vote the same. --IP69.226.103.13 (talk) 19:58, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

  Maybe to you, which is great, but human nature being what it is... Anyway, it's not as big of a deal as we appear to be making it. I was more curious then concerned, really.
  — V = I * R (talk to Ω) 11:21, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

• Oppose, of no help to Wiki readers, and featured pictures is a process which gets very limited community input. These proposals are self-referential "creep". SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:39, 22 November 2009 (UTC)
• Oppose, I think the idea is inherently flawed, as there is no good way to indicate that images are featured without either being confusing or obscuring part of the image. No one's going to understand why stars are appearing in their captions. They will just end up being removed. Kaldari (talk) 17:25, 23 November 2009 (UTC)
• Oppose It's not a terrible idea, but I just don't think it really adds anything that would be useful for most readers. And the infobox stars in particular would just be confusing. Reach Out to the Truth 17:32, 23 November 2009 (UTC)
• I had been willing to support a compromise solution but the more I think about it the less I am convinced. The only real argument as to a material benefit to the reader is, paraphrased, "Lets users know which images view well at full size/are worth clicking on to see at full size". This reasoning implies that non-featured images are somehow not worth clicking on to look at in full size, or somehow do not look good at full resolution, and that is patently false. The distinction between an otherwise "good" image and a "featured" image can be marginal at best, and to the untrained eye (or those not familiar with the process) may be negligible. Take the Tower Bridge photos above. The featured photo is clearly superior but the non-featured version is not bad. There really is not a convincing reason to encourage editors to view one image at full size but not the other. I can't see any defensible argument that these stars provide the reader any material benefit and thus no longer see any reason to support any version of the proposal, sorry. Shereth 17:38, 23 November 2009 (UTC)

Movement Toward Clearer Language

Often times, I have seen the word 'as' used in the place of 'since' or 'because.' Most of the time this makes the proper use of the word 'as' less clear. I propose that we stop using the word incorrectly in what seems to be an effort to sound academic.— Preceding unsigned comment added by 199.111.190.206 (talk • contribs)

Wikipedia already has ample policies promoting clear writing. Having a policy for use of "as" (and presumably every other word in the lexicon that anyone takes issue with) would get daft. Anyone can rewrite passages that are confusing. Pseudomonas_(talk) 11:20, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

(ec) As as a synonym for since or because is normal English, although particularly common in some specific contexts. It's certainly not incorrect to use it in this way, and I doubt that most such uses are motivated by the desire to sound academic. Of course it shouldn't be overused, had better not be used outside its proper context, and must not be used when it can be confused with the other meanings of as. But some kinds of texts would have an extreme density of since and because if we didn't have alternatives such as as. This arises most often in academic texts, and that's why academic texts are the natural context for this use of as. Hans Adler 11:25, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

Didn't we just have this discussion two months ago? Anomie⚔ 12:44, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

Excellent point, as both IPs are from the University of Virginia. Hans Adler 17:48, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

NPP from the back

Special:Newpages has a delightful link that sends you directly to the end of the unpatrolled log. I use that option a lot. When a page is marked as patrolled (action=Markpatrolled), you get a link back to special:newpages, but not to the end of the patrolled log. I would love to see this added to that page. I propose that we add that option to the page. Martijn Hoekstra (talk) 14:39, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

Edits to MediaWiki:Markedaspatrolledtext would fix that. The return to language is in MediaWiki:Returnto but I don't understand how that works. Hipocrite (talk) 15:24, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for the info, I really didn't have a clue where to find it. Before changing anything there, I want to make sure that people agree on them though! Martijn Hoekstra (talk) 17:17, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

That sounds like a good idea, though I think it is non controversial enough so that a bold admin (who know what they are doing) could add it. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 21:14, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

Sounds like a good idea to me, too. Regards Spitfire^Tally-ho! 21:59, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

I suppose it's non-controversial enough to go ahead and be Bold about it. If the trout hits my face, the shit must have hit the fan. Tally Ho! Martijn Hoekstra (talk) 22:48, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

Deleted articles

For articles deleted with non-malicious content, would an administrator create a website where all these articles would be viewable? --William S. Saturn (talk) 23:36, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

There are many administrators who are willing to mail any user non-malicious deleted content. To host it however is not one of Wikipedia's aims, but I do believe there are other sites that host previously deleted Wikipedia content. As long as their licence is compatible with Wikipedia's, there is no problem with hosting the content there. There are probably some people here who can tell you where you can find these sites. Martijn Hoekstra (talk) 23:40, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

Isn't that was Deletionpedia is about? SunCreator (talk) 23:51, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

Use {{Dead link header}} in sectoins that have dead external links

See previous Village Pump, and BRFA discussions regarding this same template (or similar templates)
So I am bringing this back again, because I think it has a reasonable amount of support. I want to get consensus to use the template : {{Dead link header}} on the top of sections that contain the template {{Dead link}}. Here is what it would look like

Section Name

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicin elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

References

The template is small, discrete, and provides a link to Dispenser's external link tool: check-links.

Tim1357 (talk) 02:25, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

O yea, and this would be automatically added by Skybot , or another bot, if he isn't still up to it. Tim1357 (talk) 02:32, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

Wouldn't it be better just reworking {{linkrot}} to cover both bare URLs and dead ones? Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 12:55, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

Why would we do this? We use in-article banners to notify readers of potential issues with article content. Unreferenced, COI, or NPOV tags are there to benefit the readers understanding of what is in an article and disclose what problems there may be. Dead links do not cause any problem for the reader that would need to be disclosed in the middle of the article. If we are going to continue to tolerate dead-link tagging (which I find ridiculous since they are as easy to fix as they are to tag) then the only place a banner like this might be useful is in the references section. Since the dead-link tag is already sitting next to the footnote, the template is redundant and seems excessive. Jim Miller ^{See me | Touch me} 14:04, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

• As I said at the BRFA, this seems redundant to the inline templates. Why is it really needed? –Drilnoth (T • C • L) 02:15, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

So what about putting at the beginning of the references section? Tim1357 (talk) 04:15, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

Educational game idea

Hi,

I am a huge fan of Wikipedia and have an idea for a game which might be of interest to you to use on your site. The format is very simple and involves the player choosing a start page within Wikipedia (for instance 'HAIR'), then trying to navigate to a finish page in as few moves as possible (lets say 'MILK'). The player is only allowed to use word/subject links within Wikipedia.

So, using the example above starting on the 'HAIR' page you could navigate through 'WOOL', 'SHEEP', 'DAIRY', and finally to 'MILK' (the score is 4 moves). The number of pages navigated through could be automatically calculated by using cookies to trace the path taken.

I think it could help promote Wikipedia by marketing the game as a fun educational tool! Also, if it is placed in the sidebar it is a simple enough format which would not slow down your site. Or it could even have a page of its own?

Thanks for taking the time to read my idea. I'd love to hear if you think it is a good one or not!

Regards,

Graham

Have a look at WP:SDOWP, WP:Wiki Game, WP:Wikington Crescent, and WP:Wikirace. Algebraist 20:29, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

Wikispeedia SunCreator (talk) 14:30, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

Time to welcome orphans with open arms

The policy of trying to "build the web" was appropriate when WP was 10-100,000 articles. Now coverage is wider it is unreasonable to expect Bulbophyllum abbreviatum, for example, to have more than one link, and I am perfectly certain that almost all people looking for the article will find it by search rather than link. Moreover for species, asteroids, stars, planets, genes, chemicals and pharmaceuticals, at least, we are in danger of creating, or indeed have created, main-space lists either as stand-alone article, or as dominant parts of articles, whose function is performed as well or better by categories - just to get that all important what links here. Time to stop deprecating orphans. Rich Farmbrough, 22:01, 18 November 2009 (UTC).

I don't really think that means we have to stop identifying and integrating orphans, and I'm not sure why having lists would be a problem. The reason we have lists is because some people do navigate that way, and expecting people to be forced to the search box for the obscure ones seems silly to me. --Izno (talk) 22:33, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

I, for one, like the webyness of wikipedia, and think that making connections between articles with the use of [[links]] is important. IMO of course. Tim1357 (talk) 23:02, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

Many articles are massively overlinked. Wikilinks should be used when there is a reasonable probability that a typical reader would want to follow them, not simply because the target of the link exists. As a general rule, add a wikilink when the target is either closely related to the current article, or else obscure.

It is especially important not to wikilink extremely broad topics from articles that are either only tangentially related, or are much more specific than the broad topic. As an example of the first, in an article on Albert Einstein, when mentioning a visit to the California Institute of Technology, there is no need to wikilink California. (OTOH California probably should be wikilinked in the article on the California Institute of Technology.)

As an example of the second case, in the article on the Stone–Čech compactification, there is no need to wikilink mathematics. --Trovatore (talk) 23:13, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

Identifying them is fine -- though I would have to agree with what Rich is saying, in that having them isn't inherent BAD or at all an indication or no notability. Sometimes there's just very little that COULD link to something, because of its specificness. ♫ Melodia Chaconne ♫ (talk) 23:10, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

Yes, encouraging sensible linking is fine, but it's "time to stop deprecating orphans". I can endorse that. --Kleinzach 23:27, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

Agreed. A category is fine, but a big ugly tag isn't helpful. Why does the reader need to know that other articles don't link to the one they're reading? Fences&Windows 02:51, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

Maybe a simple change to {{orphan}}, making it just a category, would work?--Unionhawk ^{Talk E-mail Review} 02:59, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

Good idea. Sometimes the editor needs a reminder that an article that might be linked isn't — but it should be unobtrusive to the reader. --Kleinzach 09:02, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

I like this plan, with the proviso that the category be given some name meaningful to non-insiders - "Articles linked to by very few other articles" or something similar but less clumsy. Pseudomonas_(talk) 10:59, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

I wanted to offer support for this plan as well. Note that I've also linked to this discussion from Template talk:Orphan.
— V = I * R (talk to Ω) 15:04, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

I wasn't aware that tagging orphans for cleanup was mandatory. We try to de-orphan articles because it is helpful to readers. We stop if that's not possible. So it has been, so it will be. There are no changes required here. I'm especially opposed to any changes to the display or placement of {{orphan}} itself. Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 18:46, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

"De-orphaning" articles may be very helpful to readers, but that's a large generalization. No one can really agree on what puts an article into the "orphan" category anyway.

Anyway, the intent with all of the cleanup tags is that none of them are required to be used. Unfortunately, the reality for all of them in actual practice seems to be that there are many people who seem to think that they are required. I don't have any real statistics or anything, but the impression is that there are many people running around looking for articles to tag (an activity often referred to as "drive by tagging". The existence of such a phrase ought to give a somewhat empirical sense of the size of the problem). This sort of activity is at least marginally helpful, but... Personally, I'm very ready to support any proposal to move cleanup tags onto talk pages, but no one really seems willing (or able) to step up and make it happen.
— V = I * R (talk to Ω) 21:26, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

As I'm wont to point out, I'm in the top 250 contributors by edit count and I direct my work almost exclusively by "drive-by tagging" articles that have problems and coming back to them later to fix them. That the tagging system is so advanced at this point suggests that I'm hardly alone in this regard. I'm happy to have a discussion on the intricacies of what makes for an orphan, but not on the general principle of tag-first-fix-later which results in huge improvements in Wikipedia every day at the cost of offending the aesthetic sensibilities of those who dislike tags as flags. Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 01:33, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

Let me ask you this then, what would be the objection to placing the tags on the talk pages? I don't care how you work, honestly (and I really don't care what your edit count is, to be blunt), but it does bother me that your editing activities get in the way of my reading and sometimes even editing. Again, I'd like to reiterate that this has very little to do with aesthetics, and I frankly find it somewhat insulting to have my concerns in this dismissed as a minor aesthetic problem.

As for the orphan tag itself, I don't think that anyone really needs to pontificate on it's deeper meanings, but if you'd like to do so feel free. Rich seems to be making a good point though in that this particular classification has probably outlived it's usefulness.
— V = I * R (talk to Ω) 13:26, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

Rich, I'm not clear on what you are proposing here. If you want to reduce the number of lists through some deletion campaign, then that needs to be handled with some sensitivity. Some lists are useful, & could be valuable contributions to Wikipedia. A list of species in a genera -- to refer back to your example -- could be seriously considered for FL status if it included a discussion of the various schools of thought on the taxonomy of a given genus -- authorities differ, sometimes quite radically, over what belongs to a given genus, & old classifications persist in non-biological works. Some lists are, well to be kind, relics of the old days of Wikipedia when we were all concerned about sufficient coverage & preserving orphans. (List of Egypt-related topics would be an example of that, although it is useful for its "Related changes" link.) If you want editors to stop reviewing lists of orphan articles to find ways to link to them from other articles, that shouldn't be done, because it serves as a useful tool for finding problems with existing articles; to provide one example (exaggerated for effect), if I discovered Bill Gates was an orphan, I'd immediately start looking at a number of articles I know that exist & ought to mention him to see what was changed. Or are you proposing something different from these? -- llywrch (talk) 21:57, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

Ohms law: "I'm very ready to support any proposal to move cleanup tags onto talk pages . . . ." Good, I'm not for putting all cleanup tags on talk pages, but this particular (orphan) tag would be better there. --Kleinzach 01:51, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

If anyone does decide to move forward with a proposal in this area, we should talk about the different cleanup templates individually as well as the group as a whole. It's generally a bad idea to paint whole groups of items with the same brush, after all.
— V = I * R (talk to Ω) 19:49, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

Proposed change to MediaWiki:Welcomecreation

Please consider and comment on the proposal I made here. Regards SoWhy 12:46, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

Proposal for Debate Pages/Debate Wiki

I was recently on Conservapedia, and I noticed that they have a very cool section called "Debates." They have moderated debates on that site, and knowing how many contributors there are to Wikipedia and its sister projects, some interesting debates could be had on this site. Granted, it could degenerate into some nightmare-ish version of a "Youtube" comments section, but if it worked, it could be very interesting and entertaining.

I'm thinking that the debates should be reserved for members of Wikipedia, but it would be interesting to hear from non-Wikipedia people as well.

As for what the debates section would be on this site (a separate Wiki, perhaps?), I leave you to decide.

Thank you very much for your time and consideration.

Sean 0000001 (talk) 07:01, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

I forgot to say that I'm fairly new to Wikipedia, so I don't know whether you need to take that into account when considering my proposal.

Sean 0000001 (talk) 07:03, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

Wikipedia is an encyclopedia / reference work, not a debate club (though I admit it can be hard to tell sometimes). You can propose that Wikimedia, Wikipedia's parent organization, undertake new sorts of wiki's by making a proposal on Meta-Wiki (this is how Wikinews, Wiktionary, etc. got started); your idea is particularly similar to Wikireason, so you could go and register your support for that proposal. --Cybercobra (talk) 08:20, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

Atlas/gazetteer entries

A regular and recurring debate over whether or not certain types of geographical locations articles (cities, streets, rivers, mountains, etc) meet the general notability guidelines typically results in some kind of assertion that a certain class of articles has been granted "inherent notability". Nothing to this effect has ever been formalized, and these classes of "inherently notable" topics appear to exist only in the mind of the community, not "on paper" as it were. As a result, this creates the following kind of circular debate at AfD (and other types of) discussions : "Delete, no notability established" -> "Keep, X are inherently notable" -> "Why are/who says X are inherently notable" -> "Well that's what we said the last time someone nominated an X for deletion" ...

The breakdown in this process is that subjects for which no sources to indicate notability can be found, are nevertheless deemed "inherently notable". This flies in the face of logic; a subject that is "inherently notable" should have abundant proof of notability. We have guidelines that set down requirements to determine when a topic is or is not notable, but then we have this informal notion that certain subjects are notable just because we say they are? This kind of reasoning is confusing at best and outright contradictory at worst. A large part of the problem comes about from the fact that notability as used here at Wikipedia is not the same thing as "notability" is defined in the dictionary. When we say a topic is notable we are not necessarily saying that it is (dictionary) notable. By contrast, we are saying that "all cities are (dictionary) notable, so they don't need to be Wikipedia notable". This kind of selective twisting of the definition of the term "notable" is simply unacceptable.

I used to consistently argue against the inclusion of articles that did not meet the general notability guidelines, in spite of being deemed "inherently notable" at some point, but I was consistently in the minority opinion in these discussions. The community as a whole clearly has no will to delete articles on things like cities and asteroids and species, even when there is not one shred of notability to be found. I finally was able to reconcile myself with the fact that these types of subjects do, indeed, belong on Wikipedia. Per Wikipedia:Five pillars, "Wikipedia is an encyclopedia that incorporates elements of general and specialized encyclopedias, almanacs, and gazetteers." Almanac and gazetteer entries are not the same thing as encyclopedia articles; they are held to a different standard, contain different levels of information and detail, and cater to different audiences. Yet, our guidelines are written with encyclopedia articles in mind and have not given much consideration to entries of the gazetteer/almanac/atlas variety.

I would like to see some kind of solution that does away with the concept of "implied notability" and instead focuses on the fact that, as a bare gazetteer entry, an article on some little-known hamlet with nothing more than geographical, statistical and demographic information can exist without the need for any Wikipedia notability. This discussion at VPP has touched upon the subject of inherent notability and a few ideas were tossed about on how to help find a broader solution to this issue. Personally, I see a few different options open to us:

• Do nothing. Continue to treat all subjects as encyclopedia articles while giving certain subjects a nebulous pass on the GNG by perpetuating the ill-defined notion of "inherent notability"

• Create a new guideline/policy (or set of them) to define what types of subjects require verification only as falling under Wikipedia's role as a gazetteer/almanac. Specific criteria for determining what subjects may qualify as "gazetteer" entries can be created to ensure that the GNG isn't discarded and that editors are not abusing gazetteer entries to sneak in articles that ought not be here.

• Optionally, and in tandem with the above, create a namespace dedicated to housing entries that are not encyclopedia articles per se, but that are of another type of entry. This approach would help ensure that the "difference" is readily apparent.

• Creating a new sister project, something like Wikispecies, to fulfill the role of an atlas/gazetteer. This is not an entirely new idea. It would have the advantages of segregating encyclopedia-type articles and gazetteer entries and reduce any potential confusion by having them on the same project, but would be the most radical and difficult idea to implement.

• Other options I have not considered.

At this point I'm not really talking about details of how to implement a change to this effect, rather, I am trying to get some kind of feel from the community on how these things are handled. The fact that these kinds of discussions come up at fairly regular intervals seems to indicate that the problem is real and not imagined. What I am not entirely clear on is whether the severity of the problem is real or something I have merely invented in my head. Does the community as a whole have a desire to treat these atlas/almanac/gazetteer style articles as such and create some kind of process to deal with them, or would we really prefer to treat them like any old encyclopedia article and cling to the "inherent notability" concept? Shereth 17:40, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

I think this is an effect of the fact that we present presume notability (and this is the WP-version of the word) is our only inclusion metric, when in reality there are several community-based inclusion principles that are unwritten that guide what content is included; the notability and GNG there usually for topics that don't fall under these. I've long argued for creating a more over-arching inclusion approach, with our current notability guidelines being supportive of that, but better asserting that we also immediately assume that every documented city, species, asteroid, road, etc should be covered here because of WP's goal to summarize human knowledge, and if they happen to also meet notability guidelines, great.

Now, of course, we have created sister projects specific for certain types of knowledge that split off well from WP: dictionary terms, how-to guides, etc - all part of human knowledge the Foundation wants to document. All these represent things that don't fit well into an encyclopedic format. So the question is, can we have a sister project or an equivalent means of separation of content from the rest of the encyclopedia? Unfortunately, I think the answer is no for most of these, because while there are a large number of articles that are stubby for an encyclopedia, the ones that are certainly not stubs are too inseparable in encyclopedic and reference content to work for the entire class. Take some cases:

If we were to create an atlas sister project for all documented habitated cities, articles on cities like New York City and Paris would be at a loss here because there is a lot more than just describing the location and population of the city.

If we were to create a gazetter project, you'd have the same thing for roads like U.S. Route 66 and I-35

Thus, for these types of classes, we can't split off a complete comprehensive project without harming the core WP content. Thus, we need to realize that either we need to be complete with them, and include all (within reasonable discrimination) of the classes as WP articles even if they are stubby and don't show notability, or try to assert notability and make this collection incomplete and not comprehensive. Preferably, I think we are satisfying the project's goals better with the former, including all of a class even if that negates notability, because at the end of the day, notability is a consensus-driven guideline - we define what it means we have to loosen it to complete our need to document human knowledge, so be it. --MASEM (t) 18:10, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

Don't forget that the point of a gazetteer, which wikipedia already is, is to have these articles. All places are notable, they just haven't necessarily had any notable events in them. - ʄɭoʏɗiaɲ ^τ _¢ 18:13, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

And remember that just because notability cannot be established about a town in, say, Djibouti, through our regular means of checking articles in primarily English-language sources, doesn't mean that the local newspaper, television, or radio news there hasn't covered it possibly extensively. Personally, I think the realization that the majority of those which might be of dubious "notability" are in fact probably very notable in their own country, but that little of that information is readily available to us outsiders, is one of the primary reasons, if not the primary reason, for this "pass" some such articles are given. In time, of course, if we really find that there actually isn't anything substantive to say about a given area, there is always a very real chance that the artcle will be merged. John Carter (talk) 18:35, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

Let's take American High Schools as an example. In America, High Schools which grant diplomas are generally presumed notable unless someone makes a convincing case that they are not. Generally, those that would fail at AfD are those which are 1) relatively unknown even by locals, 2) are special-purpose, such as schools for dropouts or schools for students with discipline problems, and most importantly, 3) unlike most high schools, there is nothing about them such as interscholastic sporting events which causes them to make local and regional papers on a regular basis. Of course, some of these schools, such as Serenity High School, a high school in Texas for recovering substance abusers, meet notability requirements even if they don't have the usual "notability generating" things that a traditional high school has.

Yes, this "presumption of notability" does let some very small high schools that are basically unknown outside their own county or adjacent counties to have articles without risking defeat in AfD, but at the same time it's not an automatic "you are a high school, you get a free pass." davidwr/(talk)/(contribs)/(e-mail) 20:12, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

The problem with "presumption of notability" is exactly that it is treated as a "you are an X, you get a free pass". Regardless of the original intent in deciding that high schools are presumed notable, the end result has been that any attempt to delete articles on high schools is pretty much aborted at launch by opponents parroting exactly that line : "Keep, all schools are notable". Now, I don't have a specific problem with the community deciding that all high schools are inclusion-worthy regardless of their notability, and that is at the heart of this discussion. "Presumed notability" is poorly worded, poorly understood and often misused, especially within the context of Wikipedia's notability guidelines. I am hoping that an alternate solution, one that does not rely upon nebulous concepts of presumed/inherent notability and more upon simple inclusion criteria. Dispense with the assumptions that schools "probably have some kind of coverage" and instead rely on a policy/guideline that states, in simple fashion, "High schools are always inclusion worthy to fulfill Wikipedia's role as an almanac". Shereth 20:27, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

A lot of this comes down to the (mis)conception that "notability is the GNG". Which is not true. Notability is what we as editors determine is notable, with one common case being the GNG because the fact that others (reliable experts, to wit) have talked about the topic means that it notable, and thus is a good semi-objective measure. But we do not have to limit ourselves to this, because we are consensus driven. We want reliability, for certain, and we need to avoid indiscriminate, so listing every person or the like is inappropriate. But if the community feels we should be included roads and villages and (discovered) asteroids and species, each which has a finite (if not large) number and can be sourced to at least a single reliable source, then that's the community assessment of these being notable, and thus we should include them. The problem is that too many people see the GNG as an absolute must for an article, and for several topics, I would assume to be the case. But the GNG is too artificially limiting if we are attempting to assemble the whole of human knowledge in an indiscriminate manner. --MASEM (t) 22:33, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

I wholly support getting rid of the maligned "inherent notability" terminology in favor of the more accurate statement that notability is only one of several inclusion criteria the community recognizes. We could use WP:Inclusion criteria as a central directory to these inclusion guidelines (it's currently a redirect to WP:NOT, but it seems little-used by links or visits); if I get time and motivation I may draft something along these lines in my userspace. Anomie⚔ 23:07, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

Ok, I started something at User:Anomie/Inclusion criteria. But without help, it's not going to get anywhere because I don't know enough about all the various areas. Feel free to edit it if you want to help. Anomie⚔ 23:19, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

Sister projects, or even independent projects, probably make the most sense in the long run. Wikipedia is not a repository of all human knowledge. Once WikiSpecies gets going strong, transwiking articles about most species that most people have never heard of or which are only in the news the month of their discovery would be in order, saving Wikipedia proper for animals which a large number of laypeople have already heard of. Similar projects can be set up for planets, schools, geographical locations, government entities, and other things where most individual examples have no real notability beyond existence. In the short and medium run, things will probably continue the way they are, with more and more articles being written in WikiSpecies and other projects and fewer and fewer minor articles in Wikipedia. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs)/(e-mail) 23:51, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

But will those articles on WikiSpecies for animals I've (so I'm told) never heard of be redirected to from the Wikipedia article of the same name, or will the wikipedia article redirect to a species that I have heard of (so I'm told)? How long before wikipedia is just redirects to other wikis? "Wikipedia is not a repository of all human knowledge" funny that Jimbo Wales said otherwise. - ʄɭoʏɗiaɲ ^τ _¢ 20:43, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

I think Anomie's work-in-progress looks promising. However, perma-sub-stubs on non-notable subjects aren't useful unless a proper listing and navigation system is used (like taxoboxes for species). Otherwise the only people who will see the entries are people who already know about them (or click "random article"). If a similarly effective system were set up for human settlements, roads, chemical compounds, stars, etc. then I would be less unhappy with their existence. On the whole, I'd prefer for the encyclopedia to concentrate on encylopedic articles, rather than amassing data with the excuse that "we're not paper". OrangeDog (τ • ε) 01:10, 23 November 2009 (UTC)

Namespace

The idea of adding a namespace is something that I brought up in the linked to discussion we were having on VP (policy). I'm not extremely attached to the idea, but I don't mind "selling it" a little bit. I think that it makes sense for at least location based articles (Cities, administrative districts, roads, etc...) simply because it seems as though most agree that there is a fairly clear distinction in character between location based articles and other encyclopedic content. That seems to be the reason that we're "perennially" running into inclusion issues with these articles (some of the conversation above are touching on the deeper reasons for that). I think that using a (presdu-?)namespace would help to clarify the problem because we could then talk about policies and guidelines for location based articles without affecting the treatment of the "normal" encyclopedia articles. There may be some merit in extending a similar idea into other topic areas as well, but we should probably leave that question for later on (let's tackle one problem at a time). I might be overlooking some obvious problem with such an approach, but if there is such a problem then I'm missing it.
— V = I * R (talk to Ω) 19:35, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

You mean things like Paris and Rome aren't encyclopedic topics? Mr.Z-man 23:25, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

*scratches head* Is that really what comes across from the above? Of course their encyclopedic, but they have slightly different character to them as a group. I'm fairly certain that is where the "inherent notability" idea came from, because... well, places aren't really notable, but their importance as landmarks, cultural references, and just as parts of our lives makes them something that everyone wants to know about.
— V = I * R (talk to Ω) 11:06, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

Surely "something that everyone wants to know about" is a large part of notability. Notability isn't a physical quantity like volume or mass. Pseudomonas_(talk) 11:46, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

"everyone" is really over stating things, on my part. There does seem to be a consistent (apparent minority) group of people who are uncomfortable with including... less significant locations in Wikipedia, and they generally seem to cite notability as their concern. The thing is that locations can be kind of tough to make them appear "notable" to those unfamiliar with the locale, simply because their "part of the scenery". If you go to the area then the places (buildings, towns, roads, schools, etc...) gain an instant and obvious importance. The problem is that importance is localized, because the importance of an oasis in Arabia is vital to the people and the character of that region but the importance of it fades quickly with distance, and essentially becomes nothing to people living in Europe, America, or India. That's my main point here, that there needs to be a different and separate standard specifically for location articles so that we can effectively deal with them while not damaging the normal Wikipedia:Notability guideline.
— V = I * R (talk to Ω) 12:06, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

I guess maybe it's just that I'm more of an inclusionist about places than about a lot of other things. I disagree with your assertion that places are in a particular category of being more interesting locally; a politician will be of more interest in their own constituency than on the other side of the world too; a transportation system likewise, and so on. Even if we could somehow make criteria for things that are locally but not globally notable a)it would seem to increase systematic bias, and b) I don't see how a new namespace would help. Pseudomonas_(talk) 12:22, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

You're seemingly not alone in the desire to be more inclusionist when it comes to articles about places, though. What I'm trying to convey (poorly, obviously) is some of the possible reasons that many (if not most) of us feel the same way about this class of articles. Their fundamentally different from, to use one of your examples, articles about more local politicians, simply because places seem to be more universally important to us as people. A politician is likely to never be important to outsiders simply because there's usually nothing that a local politician does that impacts an outsider's life at all. A physical location is fundamentally different though, because... well, it's there, for one thing. The (at least apparent) permanence for physical features is probably a huge psychological factor here, for most people. It just seems to me that the main problem here is that we continually try to ignore the fundamental difference in character that information about physical locations have to us, which is why terms such as "inherent notability" have been both accepted and reviled by many. I don't think that continuing to adjust policy or guidelines in order to address all articles as a monolithic whole is going to be effective.
— V = I * R (talk to Ω) 13:39, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

Too add to that: People come and go, popularity rises and fades. Places stay. The history of places is added to constantly. The same is not true of other topics. Why is that we can include every acknowledged medical condition and disease on the planet, but not every acknowledged location? Why is that one of the first things done on the encyclopedia was to set a bot loose that created village, town, city, county, parish, and district articles for every single political division in the United States, but that otherwise geography must follow general notability guidelines? - ʄɭoʏɗiaɲ ^τ _¢ 20:36, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

I'm not sure someone couldn't get that from your proposal. You said that "location based articles" (specifically including cities) are distinct from "'normal' encyclopedia articles." Yes Rome and Paris aren't notable for their location, but their location is certainly relevant to the reason that they're notable (If Paris was founded in the Sahara desert, I imagine it wouldn't be quite the same) and they're inherently tied to their location. Trying to discuss a city without mentioning its location would just be silly, if not its actual location, its relative location in terms of rivers and other natural features. Mr.Z-man 19:16, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

Humm... I think that you might be misreading one sentence slightly. In the original post above I said: "simply because it seems as though most agree that there is a fairly clear distinction in character between location based articles and other encyclopedic content.". Maybe I'm not punctuating that correctly somehow, but the intent was to draw the character distinction between articles such as Paris and articles such as (Just using Random Article here) Robert Morris (writer). I did say "and other", rather then saying something like "unlike other". Later in the paragraph I was trying to communicate the way in which using a namespace would help us deal with location articles specifically, which is where the comparison to "normal" articles came from. I certainly don't see location articles as fundamentally unencyclopedic or anything (actually, the exact opposite is probably more accurate). I most certainly agree with the point that trying to discuss a city (or any other location) outside of it's surroundings won't work, but that's not even remotely what I was attempting to talk about.
— V = I * R (talk to Ω) 20:06, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

I guess I just don't quite see why we need to treat locations differently. If they're encyclopedic, what's the problem with keeping them with the rest of the encyclopedia? Mr.Z-man 20:28, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

I think when it comes down to it, a separate workspace is redundant. If anything it creates an extra step in finding the location you are looking for. The question simply comes down to is: are, or can, geographical locations be exempt from notability? - ʄɭoʏɗiaɲ ^τ _¢ 20:36, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

See, I don't think that we need to even think about notability when it comes to location articles. The paradigm just doesn't fit. I don't like the "inherent notability" idea any more then Shareth or others do, but the difference is that they hold dear to the fact that notability is the primary issue when it comes to articles, which is an ideology that I don't share at all personally. Notability is important to consider, but it shouldn't be the only consideration. When it comes to location articles though, I don't see a notability standard as being relevent to the discussion. As I've mentioned before, the fact that a place (city, town, road, etc...) exists is self evident. Personal property does not need to be covered simply for the fact that no one really cares about personal property (including most property owned by corporations, by the way. Buildings are an obvious exception). Community property, on the other hand, is something that we're all generally so interested in that we hardly even think about it. As I've been saying all along, there's a fundamental difference in character between location articles and other articles.

I don't at all support forking such content to a separate wiki. That "solution" strikes me as being rather Pyrrhic, for all concerned. Using a namespace is simply something that I thought would be helpful for us to show: "here are these encyclopedia articles that are slightly different from the rest". It just seems to be a logical solution, even if it is slightly imperfect in some manner. One of the best things about it is that all autoconfirmed users can maintain such a solution easily, which will prevent widespread issues with it's implementation.

PS: to answer the "extra step" criticism above, that is relatively easily solved. The "namespace" doesn't need to be different from the main article namespace.
— V = I * R (talk to Ω) 20:53, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

But how are they different? How is Paris different from Mauritian rupee, but the latter not different from Syrianska Botkyrka IF? Mr.Z-man 20:59, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

Permanence? The simple fact that it's a place, rather then a person or a thing (or organization, in the case of Syrianska Botkyrka IF)... I'm not sure if there is a good answer to that question, which is what we all seem to be struggling with. The difference seems so self evident to me that maybe I'm missing something, and I'm very willing to accept the possibility that some of us may be viewing this from a different paradigm then others are, so I guess that turnabout may be useful here. Is Paris fundamentally similar to the Mauritian rupee or Syrianska Botkyrka IF in some manner (other then that they exist, obviously)?
— V = I * R (talk to Ω) 22:02, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

It is important to note that we're primarily discussing the policy treatment of location articles here, rather then any sort of... encyclopedic value metric, or some such thing. There seems to be some uncertainty on how to apply notability, in particular, consistently to location articles and other articles without giving anything special status. I honestly don't have too much of an issue with essentially doing nothing, but there seems to be quite a bit of angst over consistently "bending the rules" for location articles, so this seemed like a logical compromise.
— V = I * R (talk to Ω) 22:07, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

General Notability Guideline

I believe that we should stick with the general notability guideline as much as possible and avoid branching out into other ideas about notability just because "we're not paper". (I know we're well down this road already, but I've felt this way for quite a while.) If our goal is verifiability and encyclopedicness, then we need to phrase our debates in terms of the GNG. That's what I believe, though I know there's a huge faction that disagrees with me completely.

But even if we take the GNG as the gold standard (which we should), we can agree to be lenient in our enforcement (not lenient in the policy itself). Cities and towns have economies and politics, even small ones; most meet the general notability guideline because most have been written about in multiple sources. We give them a "free pass" (i.e. we won't indiscriminately delete them, but we can challenge notability if we choose) because there are simply too many cities to debate each one individually; it is more useful to have database-driven information on them, with the understanding that real source-based (encyclopedic) articles will arise as necessary, then to have tens of thousands of deletion discussions to weed out the minority of non-notable ones. We can aim for good rather than perfect.

Streets and mountains and rivers are more troublesome. We're not a database, and these things are not overwhelmingly notable. We should not be aggressive about these things, but we need to draw the line somewhere. Giving special status to rivers but not primary schools is the kind of thing that turns us from a republic into some kind of a democracy–bureaucracy, which is the worst possible structure for this kind of project. —Noisalt (talk) 22:45, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

Verifiability and encyclopedicness is a wholly separate issue from notability. However, I'd be happy to see the notability requirement for geographic locations solely be verification. Is there a reliable article anywhere at all about this location? If so, its verifiable. Encyclopedic is a metter of writing style. Any topic can be made encyclopedic. - ʄɭoʏɗiaɲ ^τ _¢ 23:47, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

I'm curious about this thinking, though. What is it, specifically, that makes the notability guideline so important in your view? I mean, you're sort of deriding the "not paper" aspect of Wikipedia above (mildly, at least), which seems to be a common thread among those who hold the notability guideline to a similar standard, but... well, the fact is that Wikipedia is not really bound by any physical limits. I personally think that a notability guideline is a good thing to have, but frankly the number of AFD's started with "not notable" seriously damages not only the guideline but the entire encyclopedia. Not that this should turn into a discussion about AFD's, but it's worth mentioning in order to frame the conversation. I just want to know what it is about the notability guideline that makes it so important to some.
— V = I * R (talk to Ω) 00:40, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

Requiring articles to be covered in multiple, reliable, secondary sources helps to ensure that articles can be verifiable and NPOV. If there are no sources at all, the content can't be verifiable. If the only coverage is in primary sources, unreliable sources, or sources connected with the subject, then writing a fully verifiable and NPOV article will likely be difficult, if not impossible. Mr.Z-man 01:59, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

Exactly. —Noisalt (talk) 05:29, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

So then why isn't the criteria for inclusion verifiability? Notability is subjective, verifiability is objective. - ʄɭoʏɗiaɲ ^τ _¢ 17:39, 23 November 2009 (UTC)

Because verifiability is a content issue. Every individual statement has to be verifiable. Notability is an inclusion/exclusion issue: is there sufficient independently verifiable content to have at least a basic article? Furthermore, NOTPAPER does not mean "indiscriminate". We, as a community, are free to decide where the bounds of this encyclopedia are. If enough people wanted it to list every human that ever lived on Earth, then that would be the boundary. Because many people feel that that would make us less useful (a disambiguation page with thousands of "John Smith"s is not really practical for most people who will be looking for one of the more well-known ones), and would hugely increase the risk of vandalism, and for probably a myriad of other reasons, we have decided that we should not have articles on everything, but only on those subjects that have received considerable attention in reliable independent sources. However, due to an aim to have completeness in some areas, exceptions (implicit or explicit) have been made for localities and other geographic features, species (flora and fauna), astronomical objects, genes (I think), and perhaps a few others basic building blocks of humanity, the world and the universe. Fram (talk) 09:23, 24 November 2009 (UTC)

I don't think it's from a "desire to have completeness", so much as just some desire to have permastubs. That stuff could be much better handled using lists and aggregating hundreds in a shot (List of populated places in Somewhere County), and I'm not really sure why we don't. What we really need for the GNG is enforcement, with extremely rare exception, and to quit making blanket exceptions for someone who warmed a bench for a pro team or got a paper cited a lot or got considered in the census or whatever other criterion du jour the case may be. Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 09:28, 24 November 2009 (UTC)

Proposal to include disambiguation tag for new biographies in Wikipedia

Given the number of biographical articles in Wikipedia, inevitably, there will be many articles on people who may share a name. I recently started an article on the priest who wrote to Jung, Father Victor White; it erroneously got merged with an article on a pilot who was also called Victor White. Fortunately, some one was quick to disentangle the two articles. If we do a "search" on Wikipedia and find some one shares a name with the subject of a biographical article, do we need a tag to the effect of "Disambiguation possibly needed" heading some articles? ACEOREVIVED (talk) 00:19, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

I'm not sure what you are saying exactly. We already have a system of disambiguation in place using parenthesis and hat notes. E.g. Victor White (priest) with a note on Victor White that says "For the priest see Victor White (priest). --ThaddeusB (talk) 01:49, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

I think the suggestion is that we have a "needs disambiguating" cleanup tag along the lines of "unreferenced" or "please copyedit" - am I correct on this? Pseudomonas_(talk) 10:06, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

I think we sort of already have that with {{confuse}}. As a general rule if there are two or more other articles to avoid confusing something with a disambiguation page is appropriate. ϢereSpielChequers 11:07, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

Thank you - I think you are right, the template you see seems appropriate, provided that people are prepared to use it. ACEOREVIVED (talk) 00:20, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

I assure you it's quite widely used; it is also known as {{distinguish}}. --Cybercobra (talk) 03:41, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

Stats on skins/gadgets/preferences

I'd quite like to be able to see some aggregate (no personal details necessary) stats on how many new or active editors have different gadgets/preferences/customized signatures/alternative skins? I'm thinking about usability and help/guidelines, and it'd be nice to know what people are likely to be (so, for instance, whether it's generally worth referring to the possibility that their "new section" button might be spelt "+", as mine is). It'd be useful to have a way of assessing whether people generally fiddle with these things immediately on creating an account, or only after they Know It All anyway - has this been done? Pseudomonas_(talk) 11:41, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

See mediazilla:19288 "Gadget usage statistics" which mentions translatewiki:Special:UserOptionStats. So in theory this is already possible with User Option Statistics Extension, which is not installed on Wikipedia (all we have is Special:PrefStats for 3 "beta" parameters). — AlexSm 14:59, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

Remove ellipsis character from editing help section

The ellipsis character (…) is included in the Editing Help section below the Save Page/Show Preview/Show Changes buttons on the edit screen. However, per WP:ELLIPSIS, the ellipsis character is not recommended while the simple three-unspaced-periods solution is preferred (...). Since the ellipsis character is not recommended, I think it should be removed from the list of special characters on the editing screen. It makes no since to make it easier to insert a non-recommended character.—NMajdan•talk 23:22, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

I agree and have removed it. However see MediaWiki_talk:Edittools#Ellipsis for possible objections. --ThaddeusB (talk) 02:47, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

A proposal for the use of 2D barcodes in museum

The problem

It would be nice to be able to walk through a museum and pull up the relevant wikipedia article on whatever you were looking at. Augmented reality currently allows this outdoors through the use of GPS when dealing with fairly large objects (say buildings) but most museum exhibits are too small for GPS to work, and being inside creates further issues.

GPS is however good enough for large exibits such as HMS Alliance and existing augmented reality technology will handle such cases.

The 2D barcode solution

Camera phones can read 2D barcodes and the code can be used to transmit URLs. These URLs can be used to get people to wikipedia articles. At the present time QR code is the most mature technology. Other code types could be used but fewer people could read them at this time.

The implementation

A mockup. In this case the code points at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code:1/1 With the first "1" being Southsea castle and the second being the number given to the cannon

A 2D barcode wiki or namespace would be set up. Tagged objects would point to entries in this namespace which would redirect to relevant articles (or in some cases disambiguate. The idea would be to have one code per specimen so even if several museums had say a biber submarine each would get it's own code.

URLs could be generated by assigning each object an arbitrary number or by assigning it an number (perhaps it's existing catalogue number) within the museum it is in and then assigning each museum a number. So:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code:1/1

Where the first "1" is the number assigned to the museum or institution and the second is the item within the museum.

In the case of our example the page could point to Joseph Whitworth or Polygonal rifling. A mockup can be found at User:Geni/Code:1/1 the talk page would have a brief description of what the object was where it was (institution name and geocode of the institution) and probably a link to any photos of the object on commons. In the case of our mockup:

• Hexagonally rifled 3 pounder cannon manufactured by Joseph Whitworth
• Southsea Castle
• 50° 46′ 41″ N, 1° 5′ 20″ W

The information could be held in an infobox or the like.

How to get started

A namespace would require dev coperation. It would be best to start with a small museum and we have a better chance of getting such a museum to agree. Chapeter contacts might be useful. Setting up a QR code generator on the toolsever would also be useful.

Advantages

Posible to do with current tech and fairly easy to implement and scale.

Disadvantages

Relies on museums cooperating.

References

©Geni 23:37, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

OK... Sorry to be blunt but, what does Wikipedia itself have to do with this? Museums, or anyone else for that matter, are perfectly capable of taking the Wikipedia database and doing what they will with it. I don't understand what you're asking the Wikipedia community to do, here. Why would Wikipedia itself need to be adjusted to accommodate such an unusual usage pattern?
— V = I * R (talk to Ω) 01:31, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

We've already established that we are interesting in providing our articles through methods other than the traditional PC browser typing in article names with our mobile.wikipedia.org site. The mission of the Wikimedia Foundation is to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally. It's within our remit. The changes on the wikipedia side would be fairly limited (the addition of a couple of new namespaces) and would allow us to disseminate the relivant information more effectively than museams likely could by themselves. As for the usage patturn it's not as unusal as you might think with our geocoded articles already being used in a number of augmented reality applications. Itcan be viewed as an attempt to get around the issues caused by the lack of a centimeter accurate GPS that works indoors.©Geni 02:51, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

I am not sure that this is workable but a partial precedent is established by the way we have written our geolocation codes to work with Google Earth. 75.41.110.200 (talk) 17:51, 23 November 2009 (UTC)

I think that worked more the other way around; Google wrote their crawling code to extract the information based on the format we provide it in. Mr.Z-man 23:46, 23 November 2009 (UTC)

Which I would bet is probably a standard, already established microformat anyway. --Cybercobra (talk) 09:08, 24 November 2009 (UTC)

The level of cooperation between Wikipedia editors and any single museum is enough to make this proposal sound unlikely to succeed; the prospect of trying to create a system that will require cooperation between editors and numerous museums is beyond onerous. If museums want to provide QR codes on their displays to link back to Wikipedia pages, they can do so with simple urls rather than a special namespace; we'll leave it up to the museum to decide whether the code on the cannon links to an article about cannons or an article about the castle. Shereth 18:36, 23 November 2009 (UTC)

Have to agree with the comments above, Geni. Sorry. Why would the museums not simply display this bar code, for example, and link directly to the current article?

Museum displays change so often and there are so many museums that we could never keep up. We are writing encyclopedia (on this project at least). Individual museums are more that capable of taking the content that we create and using it on their own websites in what ever way best suits them. We should not be aiming to duplicate the work of the curator of any individual museum or become a hosting company for them. --rannṗáirtí anaiṫnid (coṁrá) 08:53, 24 November 2009 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Naming conventions (architecture)

I propose (re)creation of this convention:

• Wikipedia:Naming conventions (architecture)

In 2006 this page was created, but it is not good, and it is inactive now.

I would love to expand it, and propose a lot of things, so it could be useful again (or for the first time). For all other information, i am here and willing! Just tell me what to do next!

Tadija (talk) 14:44, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

You should probably get in touch with the folks at WT:WikiProject Architecture, if you haven't already. Or write out some concrete proposals and mention them there (and probably at WT:Naming conventions as well).--Kotniski (talk) 15:58, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

link color/redirect & disambiguation pages

we have special colors for stub links and new links. how about a special color for redirect links (and maybe even links to disambiguation pages)? While were at it how about being able to fix redirects(/disambiguation) automatically without having to go through the page edit dialog. Lemmiwinks2 (talk) 19:31, 23 November 2009 (UTC)

Actually i guess stub pretty much covers both. most disambiguation pages and of course all redirect pages are short. Lemmiwinks2 (talk) 19:41, 23 November 2009 (UTC)

I don't see any different colour for links to stubs... OrangeDog (τ • ε) 22:47, 23 November 2009 (UTC)

You have to change your preferences to see that. It's in the Advanced options section on the Appearance tab. Reach Out to the Truth 23:11, 23 November 2009 (UTC)