Wikipedia:Perennial proposals

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
"WP:PERENNIAL" redirects here. Not to be confused with
WP:DRPR
).
Common decisions
and arguments
Deletion (XfD)
Arbitration (Arbcom)
Proposals and policy

This is a list of things that have been frequently proposed on Wikipedia, and have been

Consensus can change, and some proposals that remained on this page for a long time have finally been proposed in a way that reached consensus, but you should address rebuttals raised in the past if you make a proposal along these lines. If you feel you would still like to do one of these proposals, then raise it at the village pump
.

Content

Content warnings

Censor offensive images

Legal issues

  • Proposal: Because of such-and-such law, Wikipedia must do so-and-so (e.g. implement censorship as above, or require identification of editors, or defer certain rulings to the U.S. Supreme Court).
  • Reasons for previous rejection: The
    legal threats
    .
  • See also:
    CAT:LEGAL
    .

Advertising

  • Proposal: To cover server costs, or for some other public good such as charity, Wikipedia should add advertisements to its pages. The ads could be highly targeted, unobtrusive textual ads similar to those used by Google. Revenues would be very high based on Wikipedia's very high search engine ranking for many diverse keywords.
  • Reasons for previous rejection: Wikipedia is supposed to be
    neutral
    , which advertising by definition is not. Even if well segregated from article content, advertising could create an impression that our content is commercially influenced and that our content could be affected by advertisers threatening to withdraw their ads, whether or not this is actually the case. Advertising could discourage contributors, the lifeblood of Wikipedia, many of whom object strongly to advertising. Placing ads would also likely decrease the amount of money raised by community fundraising. Also, since we don't allow spam or advertising by users, doing it ourselves would be, at the very least, hypocritical. Finally, the financial situation of the Wikimedia Foundation, which hosts the website, is stable—there is no pressing need to make such a change.
  • See also:
    Enciclopedia Libre
    .

Enforce American or British spelling

Only allow the truth in articles

  • Proposal: For a long time, the first sentence of Wikipedia:Verifiability stated, "The threshold for inclusion is verifiability, not truth". This meant that the absolute minimum standard for including material in Wikipedia is that it be possible to verify it; the minimum standard for including material is not merely being true in the opinion of an editor. The most common proposal is to require not only that all material be verifiable, but that all material also be true in the opinion of editors. The second most common proposal is to require that material be either verifiable or true according to any editor. It is usually motivated by a desire to reduce errors in Wikipedia or increase Wikipedia's scholarly reputation.
  • Reasons for previous rejection: Wikipedia is supposed to be based on published reliable sources, not on the opinions or beliefs of editors. The community refuses to let editors delete well-sourced material if they believe the sources are wrong or to include material merely because they personally believe the unpublished, unsourceable material to be true. Adding unsourced material or deleting well-sourced material on the basis of editors' personal beliefs can result in biased, unbalanced articles and frequently does result in edit wars between editors with opposing personal beliefs.
  • See also: Wikipedia:Verifiability, not truth, Wikipedia:Editorial discretion, Wikipedia:Neutral point of view

Define reliable sources

Require free, online sources

Shortcut
  • Proposal: Editors should use sources that anyone can read immediately, without cost.
  • Reasons for previous rejection: Editors should use the best sources available to them, regardless of cost or format. The content policies require that it be possible for someone to verify a given statement—not that it be quick, easy, and free for you to verify it. A "replacement" source that is available online and/or without cost is not identical to the first source, and therefore is never truly equal in all particulars. Many academic journals eventually release papers, and more books are being digitized, so "unavailable" sources may become freely available later. What appears to be free in your country or computer network may not be free everywhere.
    FUTON bias) that are written in English
    ; this bias may distort its contents, and institutionalizing such a recommendation would only further exacerbate this bias.
  • See also:
    WP:NOTONLYFREE

Require inline citations for everything

Protect featured articles

  • Proposal: To maintain their high quality, featured articles should be permanently protected or semi-protected. Alternatively, featured articles could be split into two pages: a protected page showing the article as it appeared when originally promoted, and a separate "Draft" version for any future editing the articles may need.
  • Reasons for previous rejection:
  • Partly done in August 2023 there was consensus to semi-protect today's featured article for the day before to the day after.

Move maintenance tags to talk pages

  • Proposal: Move maintenance tags such as {{cleanup}} and {{POV}} from the head of article pages to the article talk pages. Some proposals recommend all tags be moved, and others only propose moving some tags. Moving templates would reduce self-references to Wikipedia, reduce clutter, and reserve article space for information about the subject.
  • Reasons for previous rejection: Every reader is a potential editor and the maintenance tags give potential editors ideas of how to improve an article. Some tags also serve as warnings to readers about potentially problematic and low-quality content. The {{ambox}} "meta-template" used by the templates means that they are not nearly as cluttered-looking as they were before 2007. The implementation costs would be large: About a million articles have maintenance tags, and moving them all to talk pages would be a massive undertaking, even using a bot or spreading the work out over many months. The documentation on all the templates, several editing help pages, and any bot or script that edits or reads maintenance tags would have to be updated manually.
  • Partly done In November 2013, orphan tags were moved to talk pages.
  • Previous discussions:
    March 2008, October 2007

Changes to standard appendices

Allow non-commercial licensed content

Establish a house citation style

Add in-article credit for images

Remove state from US placenames

  • Proposal: Remove the state from the titles of articles about unambiguously-named US places. Example:
    Missoula
    .
  • Reasons for previous rejection:
    • Reliable sources commonly append the state to placenames.
    • Appending the state is
      American English
      .
    • Repeated or otherwise ambiguous placenames are very common in the US (e.g.
      USPLACE
      . Always appending the state produces a consistent and predictable set of titles.
    • Including the state makes it clear that the article is about a US municipality, which can be helpful with lesser known places.
  • Partly done: Twenty-nine significant US cities are exempted from the convention per AP style.

Redesign the Main Page

Change the color of red links

  • Proposal: Use any color except red to identify links to non-existent articles. The usual reasons are that red is an aggressive color or that it is too easy to see.
  • Reasons for previous rejection: Red has been used for so many years that its meaning is established among editors. There is no evidence that red links are abused to make certain names or words stand out in an article.
  • See also: Help:Link color or User:Anomie/linkclassifier on how to change the color for your own account.

Upgrade GNG to policy status

  • Proposal: The
    subject notability guidelines
    , while others attempt to do away with those and have GNG be the only governing policy.
  • Reasons for previous rejection: Having GNG be a policy would be overly-restrictive on articles that could be included on Wikipedia and preclude the use of common sense. More discretion in deletion discussions is preferred to a clear policy.

Use Wikidata in infoboxes

  • Proposal: Implement infoboxes that pull data from Wikidata.
  • Reasons for previous rejection: Concerns over the
    verifiability
    of Wikidata and subtle vandalism.
  • Partly done: Template:Infobox software pulls in the latest stable and preview release versions from Wikidata.

Editing

Prohibit unregistered users from editing

Automatically prompt for missing edit summary

  • Proposal: When any editor is about to post an edit without an edit summary, they should automatically be reminded that no summary has been provided and given another opportunity to include one. (Registered users can set their accounts' Preferences to do this, but many users are not aware of this.)
  • Reasons for previous rejection: It's already an option in the user preferences, and forcing (or reminding) users to enter edit summaries may annoy them enough they will not save their (possibly constructive) edits. Forcing users to type something in the edit summary box does not mean that they will provide accurate, honest, or useful edit summaries. Manually added edit summaries also suppress the
    automatic edit summaries
    . Blank edit summaries are a good way to spot possible vandalism.
  • Partly done: As said above, this is an option for account Preferences.
  • See also: Help:Preferences § Editing

Usernames should contain only Latin characters

  • Proposal: Proposals have included banning usernames that include symbols, Unicode characters, non-English alphabets, and/or any characters that are not easy to type on "standard" computer keyboards.
  • Reasons for previous rejection: The notion of acceptable characters was broadened to accommodate single user login rules. Very few active users choose names that are difficult to type, so the problem is quite small. Being able to type a name is not necessary, as names can be copied or ignored. Furthermore, banning non-Latin usernames would cause difficulty on Wikipedias in languages that do not use the Latin alphabet, as speakers of those languages may not be able to enter Latin characters with their keyboards and would have a difficult time in choosing a username.
  • Partly done: Since 6 November 2017
    no usernames are permitted to contain Unicode characters unrelated to writing
    , although usernames registered before that time were grandfathered in.
  • See also:
    WP:UUN
    for the list of active accounts using Unicode characters.

Talk pages and discussions

Prohibit removal of warnings

  • Proposal: Editors should be prohibited from removing warning templates from their talk page.
  • Reasons for previous rejection: Talk pages are not intended as a permanent record of a user's misbehavior. Warnings are frequently placed incorrectly or spuriously. Removal of warnings other than to archive them is strongly discouraged, but does constitute definitive proof that the warning was seen, and can still lead to escalated warnings. All warnings continue to be available in the page history regardless of whether or not they have been removed from the page's current revision. Revert warring to keep a warning on a user's talk page is disruptive and constitutes "biting" newcomers.
  • Partly done: Users may not remove declined unblock requests regarding a currently active block, miscellany for deletion tags while the discussion is in progress, speedy deletion tags and requests for uninvolved administrator help, and templates and notes on anonymous IP user talk pages that indicate other users share the same IP address.
  • See also:
    WP:BLANKING

Use a bot to welcome new users

  • Proposal: Some people get missed for weeks at a time, or never welcomed at all. Would it not be better to have a bot drop one of the welcome templates on newcomers' pages instead of depending upon volunteers of the welcoming committee?
  • Reasons for previous rejection: In general, this proposal comes up every few months at Wikipedia talk:Welcoming committee, the village pump, or the bot requests page. There are multiple reasons for rejection:
  1. If a bot is used, it is cold and impersonal, and the bot is incapable of mentoring and assisting newcomers.
  2. Many vandals are exposed when one of their edits receives extra scrutiny because their user or talk page shows as a redlink.
  3. The bot would make thousands of pointless edits welcoming vandals and accounts that never make an edit.
  • Partly done: HostBot automatically delivers Teahouse invites to new users if:
  1. they created their account within the past 36 hours and have since made at least 10 edits.
  2. the user has not already received an invitation to visit the Teahouse
  3. the user has not been blocked from editing at any point since joining
  4. the user has not received a level 4 user warning

Disallow personalized signatures

  • Proposal: Editors should use only plain signatures. Personalized signatures (colored text, CSS, HTML, special characters, etc.) are inherently disruptive, draw too much attention to the user, are often poorly designed, and/or take up too much space in the edit window.
  • Reasons for previous rejection: Most custom signatures cause little or no trouble. In addition, they are popular throughout Wikipedia, and forcing users to give them up would create more trouble than it would be worth. It is better to deal with unacceptable signatures on a case-by-case basis than to issue a blanket prohibition that would anger many users, with few or no benefits. Furthermore, a user whose username uses non-Latin characters could use a custom signature to display an alternate name that English speakers could understand.
  • See also: Wikipedia:Signatures § Customizing your signature, User:Kephir/gadgets/unclutter.

Allow discussion about the topic of the article

  • Proposal: People should be allowed to discuss the topic of the article on talk pages, instead of limiting discussion to improvement of the article. Or forums of some sort should be created to allow this, either on Wikipedia or elsewhere and linked from all articles.
  • Reasons for previous rejection: This conflicts with our mission at a fundamental level: our purpose is to create an encyclopedia, not to provide a place for people to hold random discussions on various topics. Similarly, we are not here to endorse any particular external sites for such discussion; people interested in finding such places should use a search engine. Additionally, hosting such discussions would require volunteers or staff to monitor and/or moderate these discussions, delete
    WP:BLP violations, block or ban disruptive users, and so on, which would reduce the time these people (likely Admins) have to spend on activities that do improve the encyclopedia. Occasionally it is claimed that these forums could provide a place for original research to be "peer reviewed"; this would nonetheless conflict with our policy WP:No original research
    , even if the "peer review" turned out to be much more rigorous than can be reasonably expected.
  • See also: Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not § FORUM

Deletion

Further information: Wikipedia:Deletion reform

Cap on nominations for deletion

Notify all authors of deletion

  • Proposal: The first creator, or everybody who has contributed to an article, must be warned on their talk page of a deletion debate of that article.
  • Reasons for previous rejection: Excessive bureaucracy; people are expected to keep pages important to them on their watchlist. The "first creator" is meaningless for many articles, as this person may have long since left or made few contributions; "everybody" can number several hundred people, including those who have made trivial edits to the article and aren't concerned whether or not it's deleted. Regardless, editors are encouraged to notify the original author or the main contributors of an article when their article is nominated for deletion, as it is considered courteous; this is strictly optional. This puts fewer requirements for a deletion proposal than for a
    Featured Article review
    , for which all main contributors must be notified.

Deleted pages should be visible

Delete no-consensus AfDs for biographies of living persons

Rename AFD

Deletion of user accounts

Delete unreferenced articles

  • Proposal: Wikipedia should automatically delete articles that do not cite at least one source, via speedy or proposed deletion. This may apply to all articles, newly created articles, or certain types of articles (BLPs, for example).
  • Reasons for previous rejection: Such a practice would "bite" new users and discourage them from becoming members of the community, as even good-faith contributions are immediately deleted or proposed for deletion. Keep in mind that not all users fully understand our policies and guidelines the minute they start editing. When a brand-new article is started without references, the creator, or another user, is often gathering sources to add later. Many users—both new and experienced—create stubs as a starting point, with the intention of developing them into full-fledged, well-sourced articles. Of course you are free to tag such pages, and to help clear the backlog of unsourced and poorly sourced articles, and articles with unsourced statements.
  • Partly done: A deletion process for unreferenced BLPs has been approved, see
    WP:BLPPROD
    .

Grace period for deletion

  • Proposal: Pages should be immune to deletion for a certain amount of time after their creation and/or XFD/PROD/speedy nomination. This would give editors time to improve the page or convince editors of its subject's importance, and would help make Wikipedia more friendly and inviting for new users. There may be exceptions for copyright violations, attack pages, etc.
  • Reasons for previous rejection: PROD and XFD already have "grace periods" built in, so editors should have ample time to find sources or otherwise improve problematic articles, if possible. As for speedy deletion, our criteria are carefully written so that articles can be speedily deleted only if no Wikipedia-compliant article is possible at this time or the content is so dangerous to the encyclopedia it must be removed immediately. A mandatory grace period would also be excessively bureaucratic, and would make it more difficult to delete copyright violations and attack pages, even if there are exceptions for such cases. You can already request undeletion in your userspace in certain limited cases. If you believe a page was deleted mistakenly or out of process, you are free to request a deletion review.

Merge speedy deletion criterion F9 into G12

Adminship

Too many questions at RfA

  • Proposal: Limit the number of questions asked at
    RfA
    , limit the types of questions asked, not allow additional questions to be asked, or ban "canned" questions.
  • Reason for previous rejection: RfA is a discussion and people may need to be able to ask questions they find pertinent towards making a decision. People should be able to ask the questions they want/need to ask to make an assessment based upon their individual criteria.
  • Partly done: In 2015, the community set a limit of two questions per editor.
  • Note: While there has been no consensus to ban "canned" questions, they have routinely been criticized as being ineffective and adding little value to the process.

Reconfirm administrators

Hierarchical structures

  • Proposal: There should be some kind of "partial admin" that gets certain admin powers, but not all of them, such as only being allowed to block IP users or only being able to delete pages. Or, new admins should undergo a probationary period, which may include limited abilities or desysopping on demand.
  • Reasons for previous rejection: The proposal doesn't solve any of the problems.
    • If we can't trust people to use their tools sensibly, they don't become admins. Period.
    • A "partial admin" process would at least double the already considerable frictional effort expended at
      WP:RFA
      , as users debate who gets full administrator powers versus who gets only partial abilities.
    • The Wikimedia Foundation may require an RFA-style process to access some specific permissions anyway, such as viewing deleted revisions. Therefore, it does not make sense to have people go through one RFA to just get a subset of these tools and then later go through a second RFA if they want the full set of admin permissions.
    • Many common problems require access to multiple tools (e.g., RevDel, blocking, and page protection for BLP vandalism). Having only a small subset also results in non-optimal responses due to the Law of the instrument. This means that a protection-only semi-admin, for example, would sometimes deploy page protection when a user block would be far more appropriate, because page protection is the only tool available to them.
    • It would also increase wasteful overhead, because even admins with the "wrong" powers would have to find, explain the situation to, and request help from someone with the correct power, instead of stopping the problem instantly themselves.
    • It's confusing. People won't know who can deal with a problem, especially inexperienced users.
  • Partly done: Several permissions are available to trustworthy non-admins upon request, such as rollback, page mover or protected template editing. See Wikipedia:Requests for permissions for a list and the application process.
  • See also: Discussions listed at Wikipedia:Unbundling administrators' powers.

Prerequisites for adminship

Community-based process for removing adminship

Grant non-admins admin functions within their user space

  • Proposal: Allow non-administrators to administer their user space, with the tools technically limited to that space only. This has been proposed in a number of different ways, ranging from individual abilities (such as deletion), to full admin abilities.
  • Reasons for previous rejection: Lack of need; admin workload is not high enough to justify this. There are also possible security concerns; if users could delete pages in their userspace, they would be able to move pages to their user space and delete them. This ability also gives the impression of user space
    Wikipedia community
    .

Administrators should be of the age of majority

Automatically grant adminship to users with a certain number of edits or time editing

Suffrage requirements for RfA

  • Proposal: New editors lack the knowledge and experience to appropriately evaluate an RfA candidate. This also would eliminate vandalism and trolls.
  • Reason for previous rejection: There is already a prohibition on IPs from 'voting' on RfA. New and/or
    single purpose accounts
    are generally disregarded anyway. Bureaucrats are empowered and able to discern such activity on an RfA and factor it in appropriately. Vandalism and troll behavior at RfA is low and handled already by current methods.
  • See also: various proposals such as from 2015 administrator election reform, another proposal from 2015, a 2016 proposal, and a 2017 RfC.

Technical

Watchlist changes

Note that extensive styling of nearly every aspect of one's watchlist is possible through CSS; see Wikipedia:Customizing watchlists.

Multiple watchlists

  • Proposal Users should be able to have multiple watchlists so that they can group the pages they watch and not have to see all watched pages in one huge list.
  • Reasons for previous rejection: Technologically unfeasible without further development. See T7875.
  • See also:
    Help

Public watchlists

  • Proposal Watchlists are currently private for each logged-in user. Watchlist functionality should be public so that a given watchlist could be managed by all members of a wikiproject.
  • Reasons for previous rejection: Technologically unfeasible without further development. See T9467.
  • Partly done: The "related changes" feature displays changes on pages linked from a page.
  • See also: Help:Public watchlist, Wikipedia:Article alerts

Allow watchlisting individual sections of a page

  • Proposal: Allow specific sections of pages to be watchlisted, so editors can monitor small portions of large pages, such as
    WP:ANI
    , instead of the whole page.
  • Reasons for previous rejection: While many users support the use of such a feature, the technical implementation of this feature is difficult, if not impossible with the current version of MediaWiki. At the moment, watchlisting is done on a page-by-page basis, as each page is assigned a unique ID number in the database. Page sections, being fluid, are assigned numbers on the page they are situated on, but adding or removing sections above it will change the number. The name of the section can also be changed easily and new sections can be created with the same name. This does not apply to pages which are transcluded within other pages, but this setup is not commonly used.
  • Partly done: The discussion tools mw:Beta Feature allows editors to subscribe to specific talk page sections. This can be enabled by navigating to Special:Preferences § mw-prefsection-betafeatures.
  • See also: User:Enterprisey/section-watchlist, T2738 ("Ability to watch section levels of pages")

Use reCAPTCHA

Create shortcut namespace aliases for various namespaces

Move the Main Page out of the main namespace

  • Proposal Since the Main Page isn't an article, it should go in another namespace such as "Wikipedia:" or "Portal:" rather than stay in the main namespace.
  • Reasons for previous rejection There is little if any reason for such a move and we would still need to keep a cross-namespace redirect at the current title to avoid breaking probably millions of incoming links. The Main Page in its modern form dates to 2002, before the modern namespace system fully crystallized, and was placed by default in the main namespace. It has remained there since largely due to inertia and lack of a solid reason to move it to another namespace. Being sui generis, the Main Page doesn't particularly belong in any of the other namespaces either (with the possible exception of Portals).
  • See also: The discussions listed in Wikipedia:FAQ/Main Page § Why is the Main Page in the main (article) namespace?

Share pages on Facebook, Twitter/X etc.

See also

Notes

  1. ^ For example, the Oxford English Dictionary is free to (most) readers in the UK, but not elsewhere.
  2. ^ From Wikipedia:Featured article criteria, as of April 2, 2008. (permalink)
  3. ^ As of May 2023, there are 6,275 featured articles and 1,541 former featured articles (1,611 that have lost featured status minus 70 that have regained it). If you divide the 1541 former featured articles by the 6275 articles that have ever been featured, 24% of FAs have been de-featured.
  4. ^ See Policies and guidelines: "Sources of Wikipedia policy"
  5. ^ A majority of articles follow the APA style (psychology) and Council of Science Editors style guide (all physical sciences) in naming the primary list of citations "References"; this proposal usually comes from someone who is familiar with the conventions used in history or the humanities.
  6. ^ Statement from Legal
  7. ^ Wikipedia Statistics - Tables - English, accessed April 2, 2008; Who Writes Wikipedia?. Aaron Swartz's Raw Thought; accessed July 13, 2010.
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