Wikipedia:Village pump (idea lab)/Archive 14

The university professor has a profile on the university website, if he puts a link there to his wikipedia profile we know exactly who he is. Validating personal identity is THAT EASY and everyone is doing it already.

I would like to use the example situation where that what was published elsewhere contradicts the views held by the person. Who is right? The person or the citation? Do we desire to fabricate other peoples opinions and advertise them as such on-line? It is not something a decent person would do, even if it was desirable.

There are also situations where we have an empty article + thousand scientists who are more than willing to write down their thoughts specially for us -- this while wikipedia pretends them to be unreliable. By in stead using oblivious journalists we look to people who are completely clueless for advice. It is not something an intelligent person would use.

In the real world it is wikipedia, the wikipedians and the newspapers that are unreliable, the experts in a field of research are both more notable and more reliable sources. Why should we pretend it to be the other way around? Specially when our stuff is incorrect it makes for a ridiculous way of doing things. Argue all you like, it is not what a sane person would use, it just isn't.

If our goal is to write great articles we can use all the help we can get. There are lots of ways to implement a real identity and lots of benefits for the encyclopedia. It is as simple as that anonymous editors officially don't know anything.

Your thoughts?

84.106.27.204 (talk) 11:00, 11 June 2014 (UTC)

Supposed experts often disagree and some of them would like to use Wikipedia for promotion of their own theories and beliefs. Expert editors willing to reveal their identity are greatly outnumbered by non-experts and editors unwilling to reveal their identity. Should a validated expert be allowed to control an article against a bunch of experienced editors who agree the expert is wrong or biased? Should other editors be disallowed to demand a reliable published source or remove claims which go against reliable published sources?

Should expert editors with validated identity be allowed to make edits with no indication in the rendered article of where the claim comes from? Should others then examine the page history and be disallowed to remove claims which were added by an expert? Or should the experts cite themselves, for example by first saving a claim and then adding a reference with the diff of their own previous edit so others can verify it was added by an expert editor? PrimeHunter (talk) 14:53, 11 June 2014 (UTC)

Hello, thanks for the response.

• "Supposed experts often disagree and some of them would like to use Wikipedia for promotion of their own theories and beliefs...."

The assumption of good faith instructs us to judge editors by their own deeds. Technically, we cant have a categorical accusation like this, even if it was true.

• "...Expert editors willing to reveal their identity are greatly outnumbered by non-experts and editors unwilling to reveal their identity...."

Editors unwilling to reveal their identity are considered non-experts.

• "...Should a validated expert be allowed to control an article against a bunch of experienced editors who agree the expert is wrong or biased?"

1) (Experienced) editors should add sources to everything. 2) If the sources are bad but the topic is notable we go with the professional opinion. 3) If the sources are slightly better we describe how they are different from those held by the professional. 4) If the sources are reliable enough we have no use for experts. 5) Any alternative views must have sources to establish notablity.

A consensus is useful to tell 2 from 3 and to establish 5.

• "....Should other editors be disallowed to demand a reliable published source or remove claims which go against reliable published sources?"

If you think an unsourced sentence written by a professor is ever so slightly dubious you should certainly put a citation needed tag on it and/or delete it. Would an anonymous user write the same thing it would be deleted sooner.

• "Should expert editors with validated identity be allowed to make edits with no indication in the rendered article of where the claim comes from?"

To some extend, sure.

• "Should others then examine the page history and be disallowed to remove claims which were added by an expert?"

Editors can delete the whole article, that is within their power. It is just much less urgent to challenge everything.

• "Or should the experts cite themselves, for example by first saving a claim and then adding a reference with the diff of their own previous edit so others can verify it was added by an expert editor?"

That should work. It would allow the fast editors to see the difference. The expert could also write a note in the references section (much like an edit summary) I think they might just be really good at that. 84.106.27.204 (talk) 05:14, 12 June 2014 (UTC)

"what was published elsewhere contradicts the views held by the [expert]. Who is right?"

It is not a matter of "who is right" but "which is

verifiable

". In that situation, we go with the reliable, published source because an editor can go to the publication and verify that the information is present. There is no way for any other editor to verify that a so-called "expert" is correct without a reliable, published source.

"Editors unwilling to reveal their identity are considered non-experts."

To the contrary, there may be a number of reasons why an expert does not want to reveal their identity on Wikipedia, usually related to harassment and online stalking. Just because they don't reveal their identities doesn't mean we assume they aren't experts. Instead, we judge them on the quality of the sources they bring to Wikipedia.

"If the sources are bad but the topic is notable we go with the professional opinion."

Nope, we go with what is verifiable through reliable, published sources. A so-called professional or expert cannot override a reliable, published sources if they don't have one of their own to back their claim.

"To some extend, sure."

I would completely disagree with that. Experts are required to back up whatever information they add to Wikipedia with reliable, punished sources just like every other editor. The only difference between an expert and a regular editor is that the expert has better access to said sources and able to find mistakes quicker because of that. —Farix (t | c) 12:03, 12 June 2014 (UTC)

Addendum: In most cases, those experts are more than willing to work within Wikipedia's policies and guidelines as they appreciate the need for all information to be

original research. —Farix (t | c

) 12:27, 12 June 2014 (UTC)

84.106.11.117 (talk) 22:37, 16 June 2014 (UTC)

It is easy to confirm that "expert" really is who he claims to be (assuming he cooperates). It is much harder to know if the expert is right. Let's take an extreme example. I hope you'll agree that an article on Nazis written by Goebbels is not something we'd like to have in Wikipedia. And yet, would you want to argue that he is not "an expert" (probably with him personally)..?

Now, of course, we won't end up with the same case. But Citizendium had some similar problems: is a homoeopath an expert on homoeopathy (see Talk:Homeopathy/Archive 39#Citizendium porting for a mention)..? Speaking of which, maybe you should have a look at Citizendium? It might be similar to what you want. --Martynas Patasius (talk) 23:17, 16 June 2014 (UTC)

It is unclear to me what problem you're trying to address. Please clarify. Gryllida (talk) 23:33, 30 June 2014 (UTC)

Meta has related information at: Musings about unregistered contributors#Cookies authentication

I have drafted an idea at User:Spinningspark/IP disruption proposal which I would like some comment on. Basically, it is to ask IP editors to accept a cookie which can be used to identify them rather than the IP address. This avoids the collateral damage of blocking IP addresses or ranges and has the added benefit of protecting the privacy of IP users since they cannot then be geolocated or their institution identified. SpinningSpark 16:06, 15 June 2014 (UTC)

Obviously, this will require the devs to do some work on the core code to implement it, but I think we need to see if there is some traction for it in the community before raising it on Bugzilla. SpinningSpark 16:13, 15 June 2014 (UTC)

@Spinningspark: Interesting idea - not sure what I think of it yet.

Question: It might get rid of the IP-hopping problem, but then I imagine it would introduce a new problem of computer-hopping. Assuming an anonymous editor has access to multiple computers and/or mobile devices, couldn't a blocked URID simply shift to another computer on the same network, which would have otherwise been blocked from editing with an IP block? If so, this could also be harder for editors to track anonymous users, since we can't go off of geolocation. I'm not sure if developing and implementing the system would be worth it if it would just shift the problem, but correct me if I'm wrong. ~SuperHamster Talk Contribs 18:04, 18 June 2014 (UTC)

Sure a vandal can switch devices, but typically they will have far fewer physical devices available to them than IP addresses. The IP pool of a dynsamically allocated large ISP might be half a million addresses. We simply are not allowed to block a range that big, even if we manage to track the vandal as he hops around. Compared to that, the number of devices available is tiny. Think how many do you have? Typically, it is in single digits. A prolific troll will soon run out of devices to switch to as they get blocked one by one. I don't think lack of geolocation information is a serious problem. After all, a disruptive editor who is trying to hide that need only start creating a string of socks. Checkuser will soon find them out in both cases.

This is not meant to be a cure-all. It is just another tool in the box for fighting disruption.

The proposal as written is probably not going to fly. It is getting a lot of criticism at VPT due to the difficulty of retrieving MAC addresses. However, a simpler cookie could still be useful. It would be vulnerable to the user deleting it, or not accepting it in the first place, but 90% of problem editors probably don't know how to do this, or wouldn't think to do it. SpinningSpark 18:40, 18 June 2014 (UTC)

Excellent, thanks for the reply. Just curious about one approach versus the other. As long as it would have concrete results compared to the current system, it sounds like a good idea to me, minus all the technical aspects (privacy policy, actually developing it, etc.). ~SuperHamster Talk Contribs 18:47, 18 June 2014 (UTC)

I think getting the MAC address is more than just difficult. Without using something obtrusive like a Java applet or browser-specific like ActiveX, I'm pretty sure it's impossible. As for a regular cookie, while most problem users probably don't know how to delete cookies, the ones who are the most problematic are probably going to be the ones who figure it out pretty quickly. It could also have problems with shared computers that are set to delete cookies when the browser is closed. Mr.Z-man 19:23, 18 June 2014 (UTC)

Right, any half-competent troll is very soon going to figure out that they can circumvent this block by deleting cookies. However, I suppose if it thwarts even a few... 86.179.119.9 (talk) 21:04, 20 June 2014 (UTC)

Just launching your browser in private/incognito mode would suffice. GimliDotNet ^{(Speak to me,Stuff I've done)} 07:51, 25 June 2014 (UTC)

I have added a link to my essay on Meta about this topic. Whether trolls can bypass this is not the primary issue. Cookies could be a convenience for unregistered contributors to get nice things like Echo and (some) control over preferences. Gryllida (talk) 23:43, 30 June 2014 (UTC)

I'm not quite sure where to post this and this is a proposal for the mobile website for what I consider a vital missing part.

Copied from

WP:VPM

There is one thing I do request when it comes to using Wikipedia on mobile. This is a simple request yet I feel it is fundamental to the whole of Wikipedia. When editing on mobiles, it is hard to access the talk page unless you actually know of the link. Could this be added to the mobile menu?

• 
  First mobile view of London article. The left of the box is to edit the article, the second option is to add an image and the final is to add the article to your watchlist. There is no option to go to the talk page.
• 
  Second mobile view of the London article showing the mobile menu. Again there is no option to go to the talk page

Simply south ...... time, department skies for just 8 years 18:26, 16 June 2014 (UTC)

Hi Simply south – if you opt into the beta version of the mobile site (go to the top-left navigation menu, go to Settings, toggle to opt into Beta), you'll actually see the talk page as an additional menu item along with edit and add image :) The reason we haven't been exposing this to all users is that talk pages themselves render quite poorly on mobile – the formatting and threading makes them very difficult to read – and we don't want to serve millions of mobile readers a broken/confusing experience. But we're doing some work to spruce this up (you can see an early stab in Beta) and will probably continue to do so over the next year. Maryana (WMF) (talk) 17:24, 17 June 2014 (UTC)

(I have taken the libery to format your message as a gallery for readability.)

I believe the Wikimedia mobile team (#wikimedia-mobile on IRC) are working on a mobile skin, so that all functionality available at desktop is eventually kept. Please speak to them about their plans; they are likely already aware of the issue. Gryllida (talk) 23:48, 30 June 2014 (UTC)

I came up with this idea viewing template pages. Couldn't we use "T" To abbreviate the word template Like "WP" Is used for Wikipedia? I don't see why it can't be used. Lor^Chat 08:01, 19 June 2014 (UTC)

Several T:s are used as shortcuts, see Special:PrefixIndex/T:. A general abbreviation is not necessary, as most template pages are rarely referred to (other than by transclusion). —Kusma (t·c) 09:06, 19 June 2014 (UTC)

Unless, that is, you find yourself working on them much of the time... Sardanaphalus (talk) 16:13, 23 June 2014 (UTC)

Another problem is that T: is ambiguous - it could mean Talk: --Redrose64 (talk) 12:54, 19 June 2014 (UTC)

Perhaps a Preference or the like might be made available which, when enabled, interprets "T:" as "Template:" or "Talk:" or "Template talk:" or something else, depending on the option the user selects or defines? Sardanaphalus (talk) 16:13, 23 June 2014 (UTC)

That wouldn't work. You might type please see [[T:Example]] which would show as "please see T:Example" - upon clicking that (assuming that it's not a redlink), some people might be taken to Template:Example, others to Talk:Example. It would cause much confusion with people reaching a page other than the one that you had intended them to reach. --Redrose64 (talk) 16:59, 23 June 2014 (UTC)

@

tl}} template already alleviates this problem sufficiently, and helps by showing the template link in a manner reflecting normal usage for templates. I find using this template more intuitive than a (potentially ambiguous) "XX:" shortcut prefix. SFB

17:50, 23 June 2014 (UTC)

Which also suggests the most promising template namespace shortcut, ie "TL:". But more than having it available for links like [[TL:documentation]], which is no simpler than {{tl|documentation}} it would be nice to have "TL:Documentation" supported in the search bar. VanIsaac_WS^cont 19:18, 23 June 2014 (UTC)

TL:Documentation takes you to the Tagalog Wikipedia. Most two-letter abbreviations are language codes, shortcuts like WP: are fairly exceptional. —Kusma (t·c) 12:22, 27 June 2014 (UTC)

• I realise that I what I have in mind is input fields/boxes rather than links – i.e. the convenience of entering "T:Example" rather than "Template:Example", etc. Perhaps too slight to be worthwhile (unless relatively easy to add)...? Sardanaphalus (talk) 21:23, 24 June 2014 (UTC)
  • What input boxes? If you only want to be able to use that in the search box, I could easily write you a script that would automatically change T: to Template: in the search box for you, but I don't think that is what you are looking for. — {{U|Technical 13}} ^{(e • t • c)} 21:30, 24 June 2014 (UTC)
    • Actually, what would be really helpful is a script that converts "{{" to "template:". VanIsaac_WS^cont 22:30, 24 June 2014 (UTC)
    • That script sounds useful – but what else might I have (had) in mind...? (Also, if/when you're in a script-writing mood, a script that adds [sandbox] and [testcases] page links to a {{Documentation}} box's title and/or the tabs along the top of a page would be very convenient too.) Sardanaphalus (talk) 08:45, 30 June 2014 (UTC)

I think Scholarpedia should be added to the list of places to find sources right after the text Find sources: in an article's deletion discussion page. I assume internal reference means a reference for an article which is another article in the same website. If it turns out that Scholarpedia has the policy that each article can only use an article that has already been made as a reference and not predict which references an article will get created for later, then there can't possibly be a circular chain of referencing so I don't see the problem with Wikipedia considering Scholarpedia a reliable source. Blackbombchu (talk) 18:16, 28 June 2014 (UTC)

http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Special:Statistics says "Content pages 2,337". All current links in {{Find sources}} are to sites which have indexed far more content. One of them is the "scholar" link to Google Scholar which appears to search in millions of articles and pages, including Scholarpedia. Anyway, the place to make suggestions is Template talk:Find sources. PrimeHunter (talk) 22:29, 2 July 2014 (UTC)

A number of articles were deleted today, many by me. It each case, it was an article created by a banned user. Per

I have a thought, but I want community input.

What we can do, but prefer not to, is to accept the contribution of a banned user if it is good quality. That eviscerates to point of DENY, so the community generally feels it is best to delete, even at the expense of losing some good content.

What we cannot so, is accept the content and remove the contributors names. No further explanation needed, we won;t do it.

In the case the banned contributor started an article about some subject, and the article is deleted, nothing prevents another editor form creating a new article about that subject. However, as we all know, it is easier to write an article if we have something to start from, especially if it includes useful refs.

What if we restored a deleted article to a userfied page, either for a specific user or a draft page, then asked editor to rewrite any contribution from the banned editor. In fact, rather than simply edit that page, I'd suggest that interested editors should start a new article, looking at the restored one for ideas and references. When the process is done, the restored article could be deleted again. Editors need to be reminded that they cannot simply change one or two words, they have to read the material then rewrite in their own words, but this approach might help us salvage some decent articles, while not giving recognition to the banned editor.S Philbrick(Talk) 21:57, 2 July 2014 (UTC)

So we're talking about a situation in which (a) a sock creates an article unrelated to his/her block/ban (except in the sense that making any edit is in violation of a ban); (b) the sock is identified and the article, which has no major contributions by other editors, is tagged for CSD G5; and (c) other editors in good standing evaluate the article and determine it to be valuable to the encyclopedia.

By deleting an article only to

Chinatown, Providence, where I believe there is still a talk page thread that then continued over at Sphilbrick's talk page. --— Rhododendrites ^talk

|  22:50, 2 July 2014 (UTC)

"...in such a case the only thing that's seemingly accomplished is to create work for those editors who saw value in the article, who now have to rewrite it." Rhododendrites has expressed my thinking exactly. I want to say that any way for a serious and seasoned editor to be able to "rescue" such articles is supported by me. Put them in the new DRAFT namespace, or put them in the sandbox of any user who objects to the deletion on the grounds that the article is accurate and reasonably well done.--DThomsen8 (talk) 23:28, 2 July 2014 (UTC)

For context, I came across these deletions via speedy deletions for several major east-west streets in Philadelphia.--DThomsen8 (talk) 23:32, 2 July 2014 (UTC)

I always thought that the purpose of having the option of deleting pages created by / primarily edited by a banned user wasn't about WP:DENY, but rather because we had a bunch of prolific banned users who had contributed questionable content and checking everything wasn't practical. I have declined some deletions on articles by banned users because they were well referenced, the references verified, and I was willing to take responsibility for the content and allowing the article to remain. --Versageek 23:48, 2 July 2014 (UTC)

Maybe put it on ice for three years. Not the best idea, but perhaps better than immediately mainspacing it or deleting it. Anna Frodesiak (talk) 00:21, 3 July 2014 (UTC)

I think an administrator should create a new article with only the references of the deleted article but not the article content. That way, the rewritten article won't be too similar to the old one nor will editors be so afraid of making it too similar that it ends up so different that it doesn't meet Wikipedia's quality standards. Even if an article by a banned user gets recreated using that method of creation and it's extremely similar to the deleted one, don't worry about it, it probably means there weren't very many good ways to write it because the editors other than the original admin who added only the references will have no way to see the deleted article to get influenced by the way it was written. In fact if the change happens in exactly this way, some admins can even compare deleted articles with rewritten ones to further research how to tell from reading 2 pieces of text whether one is so similar to the other that it plagiarizes the other and from that teach people in a project page how to be better at writing information from a source into Wikipedia in the best way. Blackbombchu (talk) 03:46, 3 July 2014 (UTC)

That's a very interesting thought.--S Philbrick(Talk) 15:03, 3 July 2014 (UTC)

Altogether a bad idea as we should not allow banned editors stop us from having articles. Also banned or not, copyright still applies and breaking the cc licence as in Arch Street (Philadelphia) as the obvious and common result. The speedy criteria is to save admins the burden of having to check the validity of any given edit (especially if the perp is known for sneaky "mistakes") but not for deleting when the value has been established especially if there are significant other contributions. Agathoclea (talk) 18:31, 3 July 2014 (UTC)

As soon as other editors have "sanctified" the tainted article by making a substantive contribution of any kind - anything more than tagging or fixing typos/spelling - G5 must not be used. This does not, however, mean that the article is immune from challenge on the basis of being created by a banned or blocked user. It just has to go through a PROD or XfD process. But I think that DENY is an important policy goal to keep in mind - we ban or block editors for important reasons, and letting them get away with creating content before they get caught only encourages evasion of blocks and bans. So I don't think it's productive to make policy on whether content is "good", only whether it is "clean". But even with the absolutist position on DENY, if an admin or reviewer feels strongly enough about keeping a particular piece of tainted content, all they have to do is make a contribution, and it's been immunized from G5. VanIsaac_WS^cont 20:54, 3 July 2014 (UTC)

If I added to the talk page the tags {{WikiProject Pennsylvania|class=start|importance=low}} and {{WikiProject Philadelphia|class=start|importance=low}} and made additions and changes to the article, and I objected to the deletiopn of the article, what recourse do I have when the article is promptly deleted?--DThomsen8 (talk) 00:43, 4 July 2014 (UTC)

Well, the talk page is probably irrelevant under CSD criteria, but if you made additions to the article, it should be an automatic

WP:REFUND. An article deleted under a CSD criterion that it does not meet should be undeleted immediately. Of course, it should not have been deleted in the first place either, but admins can make mistakes. VanIsaac_WS^cont

04:35, 4 July 2014 (UTC)

I did a little snooping and it looks like those edits could be classed as minor, so the deleting admin is in the clear. Anyway this particular case does really benefit from WP:DENY looking at the archive. So I can understand the wholesale deletion. To add to my earlier point about copyright. Yes a banned user holds the copyright on his edits and we cannot legally reuse them without credit, but on the other hand it would be an interesting case, as they would need to identify themselves at court, which could lead to WMF testing a few of @Newyorkbrad:'s theories on what can be done with TOS violators. Agathoclea (talk) 16:07, 4 July 2014 (UTC)

To answer the question directly, what we should do with articles written by a banned editor is the same thing we have been doing in the past: judging each case on its merits. Even if the work is fair quality, some banned editors' work should be deleted out-of-hand to discourage that editor from socking in the future. Other cases may indicate keeping the work. I don't think there is a new guideline we can write to help decide the matter; it's always going to be a judgement call. Binksternet (talk) 18:41, 4 July 2014 (UTC)

The problem from my end is the the current mechanism allows a community ban to be overridden through automatic acceptance of edits. There's nothing stopping a banned editor from continuing to create articles, post to forums, and add content, if each of those edits is accepted individually by a group of editors. The result will be a de-facto unbanning, without engaging the wider community in the process. - Bilby (talk)

Well the whole purpose here is to build an encyclopedia, it is not to stop banned people. Consensus is the way to establish the rules. I don't see that edits would be automatically accepted, as they would still need to be checked. So it would still be a manual process. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 22:46, 5 July 2014 (UTC)

The "content" is more important that the "creator"...as the saying goes, once you click the submit button, you no longer own the rights to the article, its wikipedia property....There are certain things we should look at before 'deleting' the article and most importantly, the inclusion criteria...lets not just delete articles 'willy-nilly' just because a banned editor created them. I have seen admins do that in recent weeks and is despicable, makes you wonder who the real "vandal" is, the person who created the good article or the admin who deleted it...article creation is not easy to do, it takes time, for even a small stub it may take longer than an hour to get right...What exactly does

WP:DENY is flawed and needs to be changed. "Lets judge the article based on its content, not its creator"..--Stemoc (talk

) 09:09, 6 July 2014 (UTC)

By banning editors, we are making the strongest statement we can that the community no longer wants them here. If we weaken this by knowingly allowing the banned editor to continue to edit, we damage that statement to the point that it risks becoming meaningless, especially given the arbritary nature of how it is generally enforced. Why should one editor be allowed to continue to edit unabated after he or she is banned, when other editors accept the community's decisions and try to return, in time, through accepted channels? I can accept that there are times to put content ahead of enforcing a ban or block, and I do just that, but putting the interests of Wikipedia first can also mean making sure that the community's decisions are respected and held to. And the only way of doing that with banned editors is to revert their additions.

It is especially concerning that the process we're seeing is one where a relativly small group of editors can override the wishes of the community. The community decides to ban an editor, but individual editors, by accepting the edits of sock accounts, have the ability to unmake the community's decision. That seems unbalanced - it should be up to the community if we ban an editor, and up to the community if we are to de-facto unban them. - Bilby (talk) 09:42, 6 July 2014 (UTC)

I think that when ever a Wikipedia article gets deleted per

WP:G7

, that deletion action should only be visible to administrators so if it was deleted for one of those reasons, non-administrator auto-confirmed users will not see that that article has ever existed before unless it was created more then once with the reason it was deletion one of those times not being one of those 5 reasons or more than one reason was given in a single deletion one of which was not one of those 5 reasons. The reason why I'm suggesting this idea is because when an article is deleted for one of those reasons, that doesn't not indicate that there wasn't a way to write that article in a way that belongs in Wikipedia and breaking the rules and creating an article shouldn't cause Wikipedia to have an article on that topic or cause it not to. By not publically displaying that an article has been deleted when that topic belongs in Wikipedia, other editors who independently think of that topic and are about to create an article on it won't decide that since it got deleted, they won't create it because it probably doesn't belong in Wikipedia. Articles that fail one of those 5 criteria should still be deleted instead of edited to not fail that criterion for the following reasons:

• If it's edited, the stuff that doesn't belong in Wikipedia can be found in the article's history.
• By not automatically undoing all edits by banned users, future banned users might make an edit they believe is a good edit but is actually a bad one.

In addition to that, there should be a WikiProject for teaching banned users how to start making almost all good edits and not so bad edits that they can't tell whether are good or bad and the unbanning should happen by showing that they know how to make the combination od edits that will overall improve Wikipedia and not by a specific amount of time going by. They should get unbanned even if over half of their edits would be bad edits as long as they're only slightly bad edits because they can't predict which ones are good and which ones are bad and almost all of the bad ones will get undone and therefore they would be doing an overall improvement to Wikipedia. That WikiProject should do a specific method of teaching for each banned user because different banned users made different types of mistakes. Every edit page of a Wikipedia article should have a 'Submit for review' button just to the left of the 'Save page' button. That would enable banned users to keep making edits. Making the right combination of edits submitted for review showing that they know how to edit Wikipedia properly should be how they get unbanned. That button should exist for all editors like in

original research for which a source might get found later rendering it no longer original research. Each time a registered user submits an edit for review while signed in, they should get notified at the top of what ever page they're on when that change gets accepted, modified, or rejected. Blackbombchu (talk

) 19:17, 8 July 2014 (UTC)

None of that sounds like a good idea. There's no reason to hide public admin actions. Also, if one of those reasons are deletion reasons, we're smart enough to know it's okay to create a new article on that topic. It's also bad to make a WikiProject to help banned editors do anything, since being banned means they're not supposed to be doing anything here. And a user with over half of their edits bad definitely shouldn't be unbanned. We don't WANT to let banned users keep making edits. Jackmcbarn (talk) 19:55, 8 July 2014 (UTC)

Wow. Sneaking up on me. First part of that indicates that I read the first part of the previous post correctly (it's been a long hard day...). And I agree that hidden admin actions (other than revdel) aren't a good idea. The point I made below about different moulds comes in here. If the majority of edits from a banned editor have been crap, and still are crap, then bye-bye. But if there's a trend towards good (no, not as in GA, just ordinary good...), there might be a chance of redemption. We have admins (well, at least one) who started off as vandals. Could be more. (No, not me - I've only made one edit not under one of my two declared accounts and that was when the damned system logged me out before they'd made Vector the default. I can tell instantly that I'm logged out if Vector rears its bland and boring head.) Deathbed repentance is irrelevant, but the leopard CAN change his shorts. (Not typo...) Peridon (talk) 20:09, 8 July 2014 (UTC)

I meant if they were only submitting edits for review during their ban and slightly over half of them were slightly bad edits, then they should get unbanned. The original purpose of banning editors was to help make Wikipedia a better encyclopedia, not to punish editors for making edits and I don't see the problem with people getting a partial ban that allows them to submit edits for review. Since bad edits are getting undone all the time, I don't see why somebody keeping on making edits in case they're a good edit wouldn't overall improve Wikipedia as long as the bad ones are just small mistakes of one sentence whose only problem is worsening the article's style none of which add in unreferenced information. If you want to refute either my suggestion of people being allowed to make edits that they're not sure whether are good ones or slightly bad ones, or my suggestion about unbanning people who frequently makes slightly bad edits, can you give a reason why you believe doing that suggestion would make Wikipedia a worse encyclopedia for any reason that either is an expanded version one of the following reasons or isn't one of those reasons:

• The option of submitting edits for review could be created which would make Wikipedia not reduce its own improvement as much by banning people from making unreviewed edits more easily.
• Banning editors entirely instead of allowing them to submit edits for review encourages future editors to be more careful not to make the harmful edits that will get them banned.
• Some people who think they're only ever making good edits and very slightly bad edits without realizing it either made an edit that's so harmful to Wikipedia that it's not worth it being there for a short time to give Wikipedia other permanent improvements or a slightly bad edit that failed to get noticed and undone.
• When somebody is banned, people would be wasting so much time reviewing their edits that it would take time away from them contributing to Wikipedia. Blackbombchu (talk) 21:43, 8 July 2014 (UTC)

• Neutral comment Part of the trouble is that banned editors aren't all from the same mould. Some are banned because they're totally obnoxious and/or disruptive and won't understand the simple message 'go away and find somewhere else to play'. Some were contributors of at best mediocre and non-notable stuff. Others were contributors of good stuff, but with very major flaws in their modes of operation that were decided to outweigh their good edits. If there's a chance of getting this last class of banned users onto the straight and narrow, perhaps it should be taken. The remaining trouble is that very often they have had second chances, or even seventh chances, and still reverted to the behaviour that got them blocked. Might it be an idea to consider setting a limit on the number of restarts that when reached (and blown again...) really means that the user is beyond redemption? Perhaps not - for there must be something about their editing that gives away their original identity. (We cannot know how many have come back under new names and not been detected - and we are best not to know them as they have obviously reformed sufficiently...) These articles by banned users - I've often wondered how people recognise them. Is it a 'house style' or writing, or a particular subject group (plane crashes comes to mind)? Are they really worth keeping? Might another user add to the article quickly to obviate the automatic delete and help to build up a 'portfolio' for a possible unban request for the banned one? Just thoughts. Peridon (talk) 14:32, 7 July 2014 (UTC)

@Agathoclea:, Wikipedia is free content so no one has the right to say content in an article they created can't be reused, but I'm not sure whether they have a right to say it can't be reused without their credit since Wikipedia is free content. There's probably no rule that the creator of a deleted article has to be given credit when the article gets recreated if it was created totally indepentantly of the original creator and it's clear that the text of the new article was not influenced by that of the deleted article and that the creation of the deleted article didn't cause the recreation of it as I described earlier in this section. I think Fair use allows somebody to use somebody else's copyrighted piece of work as long as it's different enough from it that it looks like the way it was written could have been thought of independently so there's no reason copyright laws should force a Wikipedia article to be less good than it would have been if somebody else hadn't written about that topic before its creation. In addition to that, I think when ever anyone is on the page for creating an article, the box at the top of that page should link Wikipedia:Wikipedia is free content to reduce the number of people getting offended at the article they created getting edited, deleted, or reused. That box should also warn people that it's quite common for an article to be copied into Speedy deletion Wiki because it's quite common for an article to get deleted. Speedy deletion Wiki is allowed to do that because Wikipedia only has a rule about itself not plagiarizing but doesn't have a rule about itself not getting plagiarized. When somebody is asked to write an essay in high school about a topic and copies an entire Wikipedia article about that topic, they're only breaking a school board rule, not a Wikipedia rule. Blackbombchu (talk) 20:28, 8 July 2014 (UTC)

@Blackbombchu: Free content does not mean that you can do what you want with it. It is only free as long as the licence terms are kept. The Speedywiki you mention keeps the licence terms by crediting the original authors. Plagiarizing is one thing. Copyfraud is another. There have been some high profile cases of people using Wikipedia content without keeping licence terms, even to the point that courts awarded monetary settlements to the original author, not Wikipedia. It is not a question of being a Wikipedia rule, but a question of licencing. But as I said it would be an interesting prospect of getting a banned editor revealing his RL identity to defend his legal rights as an author. Agathoclea (talk) 09:30, 9 July 2014 (UTC)

I would like to bring to the attention of this community some additional sources for biographical articles, as well as additional secondary reference sources for existing pages. I am an editor and administrator on English Wikisource, primarily involved in proofreading of the Popular Science Monthly project. This entails researching some 2,450 contributors of the articles. Many exist in Wikipedia, as indicated by a link on the author's page, but many don't, and they should be. We only provide very basic biographical info to accompany the author. The list of authors can be accessed beginning here.

This is just one example of an interesting contributor who deserves a Wikipedia page: Gustavus Ohlinger. - Happy hunting. — Ineuw talk 04:23, 9 July 2014 (UTC)

Sometimes there's a miniarticle on a notable topic that's not a stub because because some records of the past of the event the article is about have been permanently lost. I think a good solution for the article's expansion in that case might be to have sections stating different theories about what happened. Wikipedia is supposed to have really good factual accuracy but I don't see how stating those theories could reduce Wikipedia's factual accuracy as long as each section about a theory states at the beginning that a certain theory says what happened rather than stating that it is what happened. If some of the information in the theory is wrong, the article would still be telling the truth because it only said that the theory stated that piece of information and didn't say that that piece of information was true. Blackbombchu (talk) 18:41, 14 July 2014 (UTC)

• Bad idea. See
  Wikipedia is not a crystal ball from which the first sentence reads... "Wikipedia is not a collection of unverifiable speculation." It's bad enough that we are way too tolerant of fringe stuff. No need to go further down that road. -Ad Orientem (talk
  ) 20:13, 14 July 2014 (UTC)

• In 2005, anonymous contributors
  wrote
  false information about a famous subject and were only corrected 4 months later.
  • (Registered contributors could also have done this.)
• Jimmy Wales reacted by suggesting to disable anon pages creation on experimental basis, partly as «so often they are deleted».

I see some issues with this:

• We're putting unregistered contributors into an inconvenient situation where they have to go through extra work to get their contribution in. I would like to remind again that the
  assumption of good faith
  is important, but we're explicitly breaking it here. (The greater the expectation placed upon people, the better they perform.)
• A research on article creation shows that in many wikis unregistered users' new articles resist deletion more.
• Who writes Wikipedia? by Aaron Schwarz (2006) showed that unregistered users contribute more text than registered users.

There is also at least those things that changed since that decision was made:

• The new draft namespace enables retaining drafts without cluttering mainspace (which I suspect was one of the substantial problems back then), or introducing the furious "my article was deleted! :(" reactions.
• The new page patrol and the new
  page curation
  tool exist that ease a lot of routine work with reviewing new articles.

Please provide input about re-enabling direct page creation by unregistered contributors for the sake of assuming good faith. I believe our current architecture is more than capable of processing their submissions in the long term.

I would like to hear your impression and opinion to help this proposal evolve. This is not the final "yes/no" call.

--Gryllida (talk) 17:30, 5 July 2014 (UTC)

• Given that the one and only thing a person actually has to do to create pages is to make up a fake name I don't see it as much of a barrier for good-faith contributors, but it undeniably reduces the number of bad-faith article creations.
  talk
  ) 20:42, 5 July 2014 (UTC)
  • It's a poor barrier to impose, for it filters out good-faith contributions too (which you don't have a way to notice or measure). Gryllida (talk) 04:30, 6 July 2014 (UTC)
  • To clarify: "80% of vandalism from unregistered users; 80% of constructive edits are from unregistered users", roughly. --Gryllida (talk) 05:28, 6 July 2014 (UTC)

Thanks to I dream of horses, another thought: user rights (sigh as auto-confirmation) are not available for unregistered contributors. (Were this proposal to succeed, we would love the evil opportunity of requiring auto-confirmation to create articles.) Gryllida (talk) 05:18, 6 July 2014 (UTC)

• Wasn't one of the reasons for creating a Draft namespace so that IPs could create articles within a structured environment, essentially getting their article creations approved by experienced editors? Is there a reason why submitting a draft through the AfC process is insufficient for that minority of IPs wanting to submit legitimate content on the level of new articles, but unwilling to get an account autoconfirmed? VanIsaac_WS^cont 09:30, 6 July 2014 (UTC)
  • No. The reason was to avoid the "my article was deleted :(" feedback.

Yes, there is a reason. I'm sure IP contributors are working in good faith and they do not need this barrier. --Gryllida (talk) 09:37, 6 July 2014 (UTC)

My standard advice to all new editors, registered or not, is to write a draft via the Article Wizard. Yes, it's possible that entirely new editors manage to create an acceptable article on the first go that establishes notability, is verifiable and doesn't read like an advertisement, but that's a tiny fraction of all drafts. Promoting the direct creation of live articles by inexperienced editors doesn't sound like a good idea to me. Huon (talk) 11:31, 6 July 2014 (UTC)

My definition of collaborative editing suggests that two people work on something together without one of them having a superior role (such as a reviewer). Such role suggests that newcomers don't review reviewers' work. They should, when they like. I don't like disabling this communication channel. --Gryllida (talk) 11:37, 6 July 2014 (UTC)

It's not about good faith, it's about

WP:COMPETENCE. IPs may have all the good intent that they like, but article creation is hazardous enough with newly autoconfirmed editors seeing CSD smackdowns at an unfortunate rate. The AfC process seems well placed to give exactly the kind of feedback that IPs need in order to have their article not just put on Wikipedia, but to actually stay on Wikipedia as well. VanIsaac_WS^cont

11:58, 6 July 2014 (UTC)

Where do the 80% and 80% figures come from? Does it account for the 80% of vandalism that comes from anon-contributors? If it includes it then it is a meaningless figure. GimliDotNet ^{(Speak to me,Stuff I've done)} 12:40, 7 July 2014 (UTC)

• No, when I say "80% of contributions are from unregistered contributors", I don't include vandalism. I mean 80% of truly constructive contributions.

These numbers are an estimate; I will do or find some analysis for you on different language wikis. Gryllida (talk) 04:48, 9 July 2014 (UTC)

• I think the competent use of wikitext and wikistyle is the biggest barrier to article creation. That is something that is only learnt through experience. Articles written by inexperienced editors often remain poor as the effort to "wikify" them is a high cost for a competent editor who has little interest in the topic. While I do not doubt the importance of contributions from unregistered users, they are often in the form of short additions and corrections. I think you are equating the skills required to add to an article with a solid base with the skills required to create that base. It's in the interest of our readers that the people starting the base of an article know what they are doing. Articles like
  this are not of much use for readers and the more we can do to prevent that, while remaining open for all to contribute, the better. SFB
  11:03, 19 July 2014 (UTC)

The other day I was writing an article and I wanted to reference a classic paper on Knowledge Representation by Levesque and Brachman. I knew that I had used that reference before. What's more I remembered that I had created a really nice reference, not just filling out all the fields (which there were a lot of since it was a paper in a book of papers, so there was editors, authors, name of book, name of article,...) but also I had included a quote that directly supported the point I was making before and now wanted to make again. Since I'm extremely lazy I didn't want to retype all that info. But for a while I couldn't find that reference. It wasn't where I first thought. I eventually found it but it occurs to me it might be nice to have something to search Wikipedia for specific references, not article but the data stored in reflists. I've been reading a bit about SPARQL, RDF, OWL, etc. and it occurs to me this might be a fun and useful project for me to try on a real world example. Anyone have any opinions? Does it sound like a decent idea? Does something already exist? If not is there a place I can look to understand better how wikipedia stores that data so I might try hacking some stuff to search it? Is the data stored as RDF so I could use SPARQL or would I need to use something like Perl or Ruby? --MadScientistX11 (talk) 17:52, 8 July 2014 (UTC)

Refs are almost always stored as plain old wikitext right in the article. (There are some exceptions for bot-driven templates like {{cite doi}}.) There has been some talk about storing citation data centrally at Wikidata. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:23, 8 July 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for the info. Makes sense. I was reading a book on SPARQL and got interested because many of their examples were based on accessing an open source RDF database (think the name was WikiDB) that is automatically generated from Wikipedia Info boxes. It's so cool what you can do searching that stuff but it makes sense that the refs aren't stored that way yet. --MadScientistX11 (talk) 14:20, 9 July 2014 (UTC)

User:MadScientistX11: That'd be DBpedia, by the way. —Tom Morris (talk) 23:00, 17 July 2014 (UTC)

Thanks. --MadScientistX11 (talk) 23:07, 17 July 2014 (UTC)

The best way I can think of is to start creating a template for each reference. Only the access date should not be part of the template just like a proposed deletion reason starting with concern= because it can vary according to which article it's put into. Either it should also be possible to use

bot can create a template for each of them and then those templates for unreliable books can be deleted. Blackbombchu (talk

) 03:11, 21 July 2014 (UTC)

• 1. Search a university database like this: http://info.lib.uh.edu - (After entering the book's title, go to the left pane and select "reviews"). If you see at least two book reviews, you know the book is notable as per
  WP:GNG - You can also get a 14 day trial to Booklist
  and search for reviews there.
• 2. If you see book reviews, try using
  WP:RX
  to obtain personal copies.
• 3. Write your article using the book reviews as sources.

By having Wikipedians systematically writing these source book articles, they will have opinions on what the book does right/does wrong/should be doing/any biases of the author and this will immensely improve the quality of the supporting articles. WhisperToMe (talk) 12:10, 10 July 2014 (UTC)

A book doesn't have to meet WP:GNG to be a reliable source. Eric Corbett 15:01, 10 July 2014 (UTC)

I am aware there are other ways a book can pass notability other than GNG. But in any case two reviews = GNG WhisperToMe (talk) 15:33, 10 July 2014 (UTC)

So why fixate on two reviews? I understood you to be talking about reliability, not notability; the two are not the same. Eric Corbett 15:36, 10 July 2014 (UTC)

Two is the minimum to establish notability (of course there can be more than two!), which is used to make the article about the book. But the article's purpose is not only to be a Wikipedia article, but to verify facts about the book (in other words the article exists for internal reasons as well as external ones). To understand what I mean, please see the notes that come with one book article I have written: Talk:Deng_Xiaoping_and_the_Making_of_Modern_China WhisperToMe (talk) 15:44, 10 July 2014 (UTC)

• I'll be the first to say it, but I doubt I'll be the last: this way madness lies.

If you want to use the reviews as sources, it will of course be necessary to ensure that they, too, are reliable. The obvious approach, following your reasoning, is to write articles about these reviews. This can be done by finding discussion of each review - if at least two such discussions cannot be found, we know that this review is not notable, and so not an acceptable source for a Wikipedia article. If we can't use the review, we can't write about the book, and so we can't write an article using the book. However, even if we do find suitable reviews, each in turn twice discussed elsewhere, we now face the problem with the discussion of the reviews: how do we know that these are suitable sources for Wikipedia? Obviously, by your thinking, we now need articles about the discussions about the reviews about the books that we were planning to use as references for the article we started with. But for these discussions to be appropriate sources for Wikipedia, we have to find evidence that these discussions are themselves trustworthy sources. So we will need critiques of the discussions. By similar reasoning, we will need documentation of the critiques. And in turn we will need reports of this documentation. And so so. Failures will always propagate upstream, while the need for reliable sources will always propagate downstream. Worse, by introducing the need for twice as many of everything at each level down the chain, you double the workload for each step to the next level.

I appreciate what you're trying to do, but I feel that our existing approach - many eyes looking at each article, steadily scrubbing away at the errors and biases - works reasonably well at present. Certainly, I feel the approach you advance here would be less efficient and effective at producing articles that are reasonably reliable and reasonably bias-free within a relatively short time, and with relatively few resources. RomanSpa (talk) 15:03, 10 July 2014 (UTC)

Thank you for bringing up these points. Here are a few things to help aid the understanding of this matter:

• 1. If a review appears in a university academic database, it is a suitable source for Wikipedia. There is no question of whether they are admissible.
• 2. It's not a matter of saying "Oh we can't admit this book because I don't have sources saying it's okay" but it's when you have "source conflict" or a case when an author believes a reliable source published book is actually making factual errors. I took notes on the reviews of one book, and this is evidence of why it's important to pay attention to book reviews: Talk:Deng_Xiaoping_and_the_Making_of_Modern_China - Now, are these reviewers in fact wrong? Maybe, but the only way to know is to chase the trail and see what other people say about these things.
• 3. I do understand your concern about increasing workload. In articles that are relatively uncontroversial with few disputes, I understand that there isn't a need to worry about the sources so much. In the cases of "popular" or "disputed" topics you will find conflicts about facts and questions over whether this book is getting it right. I recall an editor of Hmong people-related topics talking about a source that is RS but in fact has been stated to have made factual errors. Readers need to know these things about the sources they use! - While I understand your point that you don't want to increase the workload but my belief is that if you want to build a quality encyclopedia and make it better, it's unavoidable.

WhisperToMe (talk) 15:41, 10 July 2014 (UTC)

Nicely put, I agree completely. And I'm completely mystified by the notion that a book review could in some way act as a substitute for the book itself. Eric Corbett 15:09, 10 July 2014 (UTC)

I did not mean to imply the reviews are substitutes for the books. I meant that they are supplements for the books, and they are "companions" on how to approach the books or use them. By summarizing this info in Wikipedia articles, editors can get a better handle on what the academic community thinks about the books, and what information should or should not be used. WhisperToMe (talk) 15:48, 10 July 2014 (UTC)

How else is one to interpret "Write your article using the book reviews as sources"? In case it's not already abundantly clear, I think that this is an absolutely dreadful idea that just hasn't been thought through. Eric Corbett 15:54, 10 July 2014 (UTC)

It is interpreted like this: "Write the article about the book itself using the book reviews as the source for information about the book. I apologize if the meaning isn't clear. I brought this up on the French Wikipedia and someone immediately said that he was writing an article about a book and he was wanting to know what the criteria is for writing articles on books. (fr:Wikipédia:Le_Bistro/10_juillet_2014#Id.C3.A9e_:_r.C3.A9diger_des_articles_de_Wikip.C3.A9dia_sur_les_livres_utilis.C3.A9s_comme_sources) WhisperToMe (talk) 15:59, 10 July 2014 (UTC)

"If a review appears in a university academic database, it is a suitable source for Wikipedia" isn't just wrong, it's spectacularly misguided. University databases contain all kinds of crankery—this is as bad an idea as "Every book published by Penguin is automatically reliable".

Likewise, the idea you appear to be pushing that any book which receives two published reviews is automatically notable, is (to put it bluntly) outright nuts. There are so many specialist journals one can get two reviews for just about anything—I've no doubt that if I went through a batch of ferret-keeping journals I'd be able to find numerous reviews of Ferrets as a New Pet, but it doesn't mean Wikipedia has any good reason to include an article on it. 80.42.71.223 (talk) 15:59, 10 July 2014 (UTC)

"University databases contain all kinds of crankery—this is as bad an idea as "Every book published by Penguin is automatically reliable"." - Do you have examples? Which publications are "crankery" and how would I identify them? Usually inclusion in EBSCOHost, JSTOR, Project MUSE, Gale Group, etc. would mean "reliability" and I have not seen something in a university database which would be unsuitable for use in a school paper.

"Likewise, the idea you appear to be pushing that any book which receives two published reviews is automatically notable, is (to put it bluntly) outright nuts." - It's

WP:GNG

and frankly it can go for any subject. So, in other words: "I've no doubt that if I went through a batch of ferret-keeping journals I'd be able to find numerous reviews of Ferrets as a New Pet, but it doesn't mean Wikipedia has any good reason to include an article on it." - There are people out there who have an insane, specialist interest in ferrets. Frankly they would love an article on "Ferrets as a New Pet" to pieces. Wikipedia already has articles on specialist publications and these are the things which don't make GNG but have subject-specific exceptions written in so they do have articles anyway.

WhisperToMe (talk) 16:04, 10 July 2014 (UTC)

Have you ever actually written an article on a book? If you have, can you point me to it? Because frankly it doesn't sound as if you have. And why do you keep banging on about WP:GNG when we're supposed to be talking about WP:RS? Eric Corbett 16:08, 10 July 2014 (UTC)

?

Before Homosexuality in the Arab‐Islamic World, 1500–1800... It's a project I've been working on for quite a while, Eric. "And why do you keep banging on about WP:GNG when we're supposed to be talking about WP:RS?" - It's about both. You use WP:GNG to write the article on the book, and use the same article on the book and the talk page of the said article to discuss the WP:RS properties about the said book when using it as a Wikipedia source. I bring up both because reviewers talk about these things, Eric. WhisperToMe (talk

) 16:14, 10 July 2014 (UTC)

Theoretically, I agree with this idea, and have in fact proposed it elsewhere myself before, then primarily for reference books. The response was that this has been permitted for some time, and editors have known they could do it, but few if any people have shown any interest in doing it. John Carter (talk) 16:27, 10 July 2014 (UTC)

Thank you for bringing that up! Do you remember where you made the proposal? I would like to see the discussion. It may stimulate more interest if people see examples or if articles on these books become more and more common WhisperToMe (talk) 16:31, 10 July 2014 (UTC)

Okay, here's the discussion that had given me the idea of writing articles on sources: User_talk:Nposs#History_of_a_People_by_Quincy

• Quincy has been discussed on the Hmong people talk page. As I posted there: Quincy's book has largely been discredited as a source of reliable information and it must be used as a reference with great caution. Suggested reading on the problems with Quincy's work: "The Myth of Sonom, the Hmong King" by Robert Entenmann, Hmong Studies Journal, Vol 6, 2005 and "The State of Hmong Studies". Nicholas Tapp. In: Hmong/Miao in Asia. Ed. Nicholas Tapp, et al. Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 2004: see pages 18-20 in particular for a thorough discussion of several of the numerous inaccuracies in the book. (the Quincy book is being used as a source by Anne Fadiman's book, so again... going down the rabbit hole is sadly necessary)

The Wikipedian told me that this otherwise RS book had factual errors documented by other authors, and I think these things are important to keep track of.

WhisperToMe (talk) 16:54, 10 July 2014 (UTC)

One more thing: One Wikipedian has ideas on how to prioritize which academic books should have articles written first: Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_China/Archive_24#Articles_on_important_China_books WhisperToMe (talk) 19:03, 10 July 2014 (UTC)

If you really want to try this your best bet would be to contact Wikipedia:WikiProject Books. I might also suggest creating some articles like Bibliography of Antarctica and some others I and others have created. But there seems to me to be rather little interest in such efforts here. Perhaps(?) a better idea for some topics might be to create pages like those in Category:WikiProject lists of encyclopedic articles for good reference books on specific topics, as recent specialist reference sources often tend to be good indicators of academic opinions. John Carter (talk) 19:27, 10 July 2014 (UTC)

Thank you for your feedback! I have contacted WikiProject Books beforehand, so what I will do is quote you and add your additional suggestions to the page. It is good to suggest creating the most prominent academic books in given fields (a lot of book articles I've written are on more specific topics, such as The Japanese in Latin America)

Now, maybe additional interest will come if I write an article on Hmong: History of a People by Quincy, and include reliable secondary source information on the errors that User:Nposs says exist in this book (that is if the said information is stated in reliable book review sources). Then I link to that book from Fadiman's book, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down since she gets the information on Hmong history from it (Fadiman stated this in a footnote page). And Wikipedians will understand that I'm completely serious when I say you can write Wikipedia articles on books to show/display information that can gauge the reliability of a book. So even if the Wikipedians who know this have to retire or die, the "memory" of the information of the book is kept alive because someone wrote a Wikipedia article on it with sources that can be pulled from a database (talk page discussions unfortunately may get buried). WhisperToMe (talk) 03:18, 11 July 2014 (UTC)

Hmm... the University of Houston database is not showing any book reviews of "Hmong, history of a people" (it's showing only two copies of the book itself) - I'll have to see if they are elsewhere, but if no written reviews exist it will not be possible to write an article on the book. Found reviews! (I used the database of the

Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries which is supposed to indicate higher end academic books WhisperToMe (talk

) 03:50, 11 July 2014 (UTC)

Now I've started

User:WhisperToMe/Hmong: History of a People (I will release it into the main space upon receiving one more book review). Notice how this isn't just an ordinary book but is, according to a St. Olaf College professor, "the only easily available English-language study of Hmong history" (it's now 2014 so that may not be true anymore, but still...). And there are at least two authors who dispute facts about the book. Wikipedians are very likely to cite this book, and they need to know about these things. By having this information not only in the talk but in the book article itself, the disputes become more widely understood. WhisperToMe (talk

) 04:50, 11 July 2014 (UTC)

And now that I found an extract of one source, I moved Hmong: History of a People into the mainspace. The kinds of things I found are things that you want to know about potential sources. WhisperToMe (talk) 09:18, 11 July 2014 (UTC)

After discussing Fadiman's book and History of a People here, I think User:ch gives good advice: Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_China#China-related_books_that_may_be_eligible_for_Wikipedia_articles - He argues focusing on books targeting a general audience that may be featured at book clubs, and for academic books the priority can be focusing on those cited the most often. WhisperToMe (talk) 13:58, 13 July 2014 (UTC)

It's a bad idea to write Wikipedia articles about references because those Wikipedia articles themselves unlike the Wikipedia articles those references are used in would be very unreliable. This is the idea lab, not proposals so there's no need to support or oppose this idea instead of suggesting another method of determining reliable sources by continuing this discussion at #Reference Finder?. Blackbombchu (talk) 03:23, 21 July 2014 (UTC)

While I wouldn't mind continuing the discussion elsewhere, the idea "because those Wikipedia articles themselves unlike the Wikipedia articles those references are used in would be very unreliable" doesn't take into account the various book reviews which are reliable sources. Just like with regular articles, articles on books *must* reflect what secondary sources say. I have written these articles on sources. It can be done and has been done. WhisperToMe (talk) 10:54, 21 July 2014 (UTC)

The importance scale can surely vary between Wiki Projects.The quality scale is another story.I propose an inter-Wiki Project quality assessment system.I have recently noticed articles with differing quality scales between Wiki Projects.Catlemur (talk) 20:19, 21 July 2014 (UTC)

That already exists:

Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Assessment. Notice, though, that many assessments are out of date, that there are a few (mostly minor) variations (extra classes used, other classes not used), and that each individual assessor may have a different interpretation of the standards. For example, one person may say that the minimum citation amount for a B-class article is at least one inline citation in every section, and another person may require that level for every paragraph. WhatamIdoing (talk

) 17:53, 22 July 2014 (UTC)

Proposals 1 & 2 seem like a "blacklist", not sure how that might be enforceable. If the topic ban applies to e.g. matters concerning Israel and Palestine, all relevant pages (and there are a lot) would need to be added to the blacklist; but that would not prevent the user from creating a new page which just happens to concern itself with Palestine-Israel matters.

Proposal 3 seems worthy of further consideration, in the form of a "whitelist". The pages which a blocked user might justifiably wish to comment might be any one or more of AN, ANI, SPI, an ArbCom case, or some other page where that user's conduct is under discussion. If accused of something, they should be permitted to defend themselves (unless their only comments are disruptive to that process). --Redrose64 (talk) 09:24, 16 July 2014 (UTC)

You have better worded what I was saying with #3. "Whitelisting" certain pages is a good way to put it. At the very least, if we could find a way of implementing it, I don't see any cons there.

(talk)

22:44, 16 July 2014 (UTC)

I'm going to gut instinct say no. If the user is topic banned, there has to be something significant that they've done to flout the consensus or the will of the community. If after being topic banned, the user can't be trusted to respect the conditions of the ban, we can't be certain that they'll respect any other conditions anywhere on the site and therefore the technical measure of enforcing the ban (a block) is now appropriate. Hasteur (talk) 17:03, 16 July 2014 (UTC)

"If after being topic banned, the user can't be trusted to respect the conditions of the ban, we can't be certain that they'll respect any other conditions anywhere on the site". How can you say that? Some editors have entirely different editing patterns on one part of the site as on another, so I am not sure that statement is entirely valid.

(talk)

18:22, 16 July 2014 (UTC)

If we've told a user "Don't do that" and they do whatever we told them not to do, we should not let them continue kicking us like a schoolyard bully. Either they can respect the topic ban and stay away from whatever the community found troublesome, or they can be enforced to stay away from the entirety of Wikipedia. Hasteur (talk) 19:08, 16 July 2014 (UTC)

I think that this is an interesting idea. #1 would prevent accidental editing for topic-banned users, especially for people who do wikignoming or use AWB. If I'm fixing spelling errors, I might not notice that the error turned up on a page that I shouldn't be editing. I think it would be a bit of a relief to people whose topic ban amounts to "don't edit what the other guy has edited", which is much harder to keep track of than "don't edit anything about politics". #2 might be convenient for automatically enforcing topic bans on AFDs, editing categories, etc., but I think it's less important. Like Redrose, I think #3 would be handy for unban discussions, whose current method is that some other editor copies and pastes the banned user's comments to AN. With WP:Flow, you could even make it specific to the single section at WP:AN, which would be even better. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:31, 16 July 2014 (UTC)

I think this is worth some consideration. However, it does seem like a fairly obvious idea to me, so I'm wondering if this is the first time that it's been proposed. Is there any way we can find out if someone has suggested this before, and, if so, why was it not implemented then? There's been a brief search already, and that didn't show up anything. Is there a way of doing a more in-depth search of historical proposals? RomanSpa (talk) 19:56, 16 July 2014 (UTC)

This could be done with edit filters, but we would not want to overload editfilter with checking for all the different topic bans, so perhaps a way to add edit filters to one user only could make this very efficient. Then there would be a lot of control over what is allowed. So we could for example stop uploads, moves or mentions of particular users or words with edit filters. Also with edit filter there would not have to be a lot of development to support extra interfaces, or training admins on new technologies to use. The same technology would be used to help people with common errors, for example I will often type "THis" and then have to fix it. But most others do not have the same problem. So it could be set to warning for mistakes for that use. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 22:27, 16 July 2014 (UTC)

@RomanSpa: Yes, it has been suggested before; see Wikipedia:Per-article blocking and the links therein. Graham87 03:54, 18 July 2014 (UTC)

Thank you. So it's fairly clear that this idea's been around for a while, and has in the past garnered broad support. The obvious question is "Why has it not been implemented?". We need to talk to an expert in implementation, I suppose. Can anyone provide an answer? RomanSpa (talk) 05:40, 18 July 2014 (UTC)

Is nobody going to respond? Is there some place at http://mediawiki.org to file proposed software changes perhaps?

(talk)

23:59, 19 July 2014 (UTC)

Software requests usually go to Bugzilla. The main list of bugs for that extension is here. The first step is to see whether anything there is related to what you want to do. If so, then we can add any useful comments; if not, then we can create a new report. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 01:29, 20 July 2014 (UTC)

• mw:Extension:PageBlock and bugzilla:674. Legoktm (talk) 01:34, 20 July 2014 (UTC)

It seems that this idea received a great amount of support way back in 2005. I'm sad to know that it was never implemented.

(talk)

02:43, 20 July 2014 (UTC)

How can I draw attention to this thread? Nobody is commenting anymore.

(talk)

03:26, 21 July 2014 (UTC)

Could try an RFC tag. Monty₈₄₅ 03:46, 21 July 2014 (UTC)

• My thoughts are that this would help avoid a block for some people, but that its the minority. Many who end up with a topic ban have a problem in an entire area/field, not just a small subset of articles. So if you block them from editing one article, they will just move to a related article and still be a problem. I'm not sure if the small subset that are strictly problematic with respect to just one article is really worth the effort of implementation. Monty₈₄₅ 03:46, 21 July 2014 (UTC)
  • @
    (talk)
    03:51, 21 July 2014 (UTC)
• I think it's a great idea to sometimes only block a user from editing specific articles, since I can easily see why an editor might have a problem only with a few articles. Although I can't think of an example that would make somebody only be untrustworthy with only a few articles instead of a whole topic, adding in wrong information by mistake, I'm sure there are cases where that could happen so it might be worth sometimes blocking people from editing specific articles. Another solution that's better than giving somebody a topic ban entirely might be to add a feature of submitting an edit for review, which is totally different from what I proposed in Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Archive 106#Pending changes where no edits by anyone are visible right away, and tell them they may only submit edits of articles on that topic for review. I think the feature of submitting edits for review should be available to everyone, not just banned users because enabling people to submit edits for review doesn't stop them from being able to make an edit right away. I think Wikipedia even allows somebody to add in unsourced information if they believe that a reliable source for that information exists and they can't find one and not that no such source exists so for someone who's only a tiny bit disruptive to Wikipedia on a certain topic, it might be a good idea to give them a weak topic ban where for any article on that topic, they can only add in information if they find a source for that information and cite it. Blackbombchu (talk) 22:41, 21 July 2014 (UTC)
  • It could be used to enforce "stop posting on my talk page" requests. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:46, 22 July 2014 (UTC)

See

As most of us know, Wikipedia has many, many archives, possibly more than there are pages here. I propose we delete our archives that hold no significance. — Preceding unsigned comment added by JDgeek1729 (talk • contribs) 09:01, 17 July 2014 (UTC)

• The problem with archives is (often) their poor facility for browsing and searching. Searching through revision history is even harder, so I don't see why we would force everyone to go the less usable route for no technical gain (since text is cheap and wikipedia can effectively store an infinite amount of it for an indefinite period of time). Protonk (talk) 14:17, 17 July 2014 (UTC)

• That's mainly for finding relevant discussions should an argument be restarted on the same topic and citing consensus. Therefore we should not delete archives. We don't gain anything doing that anyway.Forbidden User (talk) 15:31, 17 July 2014 (UTC)

Concur with Forbidden User. JDgeek1729, what makes an archive "hold no significance" vs one that is or might be useful at some unknown point in the future? DMacks (talk) 18:17, 17 July 2014 (UTC)

• No, I meant things like
  WP:AFD submissions from five years ago, or page revisions that have no point being there, and just clog up your screen JDgeek1729 (talk
  ) 18:24, 17 July 2014 (UTC)

That's exactly my point. Old AFDs are used as precedent for current discussions and to know whether recreation is

WP:CSD#G4 vs actually now being viable. The phrase "page revisions that have no point being there, and just clog up your screen" suggests you are talking about removing entries from article-history of a page itself rather than deleting separate pages (*/archive). That's a separate issue (please tell me if I misunderstand), but if all you care about is recent history, then just don't jump to earlier-in-time entries. DMacks (talk

) 18:29, 17 July 2014 (UTC)

• I thought among the lines of old talk page archives, that are no longer needed, or, maybe old
  WP:AfC archives from years back JDgeek1729 (talk
  ) 18:55, 17 July 2014 (UTC)

Old talk page archives may still be useful. As regards old AfC drafts, after six months of inactivity these become eligible for

WP:CSD#G13. --Redrose64 (talk

) 19:40, 17 July 2014 (UTC)

• The point of having the archives open is so readers can see how Wikipedia works if they choose to look. It's important that we keep things like AfD debates around so that we can look into and debate changes to policy. Without that process being public, editors are denied the source material to argue for change. If, for instance, you think that we need to strengthen BLP policy around deletion of non-notable subjects, being able to point to examples of biographical AfDs that you think have gone awry. Similarly, when discussing whether a source is reliable or not, it is useful to be able to look at discussions of that source that have appeared in the old archives of the
  reliable sources noticeboard to see if there have been issues which other editors have considered serious and worth noting. For better or worse (and transparency has both good and bad effects), Wikipedia tries to show as much of the guts of its processes as possible—archiving away bits of the machine in the name of relevance seems misguided and against the general spirit of how Wikipedia as a project thinks of itself. —Tom Morris (talk
  ) 22:54, 17 July 2014 (UTC)

• Oppose Frankly, I see no reason to delete past archives. They provide context for many of our policies and guidelines as well as article content and organization. There is nothing to be gained here. On top of that, Wikipedia is not paper and we do not have to concern ourselves with how much room these archives take. As editors, we should not worry about how much disc space talk page archives and page revisions take. In short, there is no such thing as "too many archives". —Farix (t | c) 11:21, 18 July 2014 (UTC)

• Lacks Clear Criterion for Action. Proposal is to delete archives "that have no significance", but this phrase is not defined. Discussion above suggests that different editors have sharply different understandings of how this phrase might be understood. With no well-defined criterion for action there can be no action. RomanSpa (talk) 08:01, 19 July 2014 (UTC)
  • I agree with RomanSpa here. @JDgeek1729: do you have any ideas about what types of archive are "non-significant" (i.e. would be fine just to leave in edit history and not be searchable)? SFB 10:17, 19 July 2014 (UTC)

• My line of thinking was deleting things such as old talk page archives filled with things that are of zero importance to keep and just clutter and make browsing harder

Examples:

Talk:Customer experience management

Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/IncidentArchive535

Talk:Main Page/Archive 170

JDgeek1729 (talk) 14:35, 19 July 2014 (UTC)(not an example)

@JDgeek1729: On what basis do you consider that these three examples are "of zero importance"? --Redrose64 (talk) 15:13, 19 July 2014 (UTC)

• Oppose deleting archives. I read archives all the time. Deleting does not free up space it just hides them. There is no reason to delete our history. @
  Chillum
  15:20, 19 July 2014 (UTC)

• @JDgeek1729: This may be irrelevant, but I posted an edit request on Template talk:Archives#Give the archive box an element ID to add an element ID to the archive box. This way you can easily hide the "cluttering" archive boxes with ad blockers. However, I oppose deleting the archives themselves. Zhaofeng Li [talk... contribs...] 09:11, 20 July 2014 (UTC)

  @Zhaofeng Li: You don't need ad blockers: you can use personal CSS within Wikipedia. We have added an id to the {{archives}} template, so that you can add this line

  table#archivebox { display: none; }
  

  to Special:MyPage/common.css which will hide the {{archives}} box wherever it is used. --Redrose64 (talk) 20:46, 21 July 2014 (UTC)

@

"I just don't like it" isn't a Wikipedia policy. RomanSpa (talk

) 09:17, 20 July 2014 (UTC)

• Strong, really strong Oppose - Archives are essential, if only for documentation. It is context for policies, provides examples for good and bad practices, it is of help in issues with editors, it keeps and explains past administrative decisions, it documents consensus building etc. -and, if nothing else, history. History is important, per se and for what it can teach us in the future. Asking to remove archives is like asking to burn old newspapers from libraries because, well, they are old and get dusty, aren't they?--cyclopia^speak! 10:48, 21 July 2014 (UTC)
• Absolutely oppose per User:Cyclopia and in addition want to point out that one of the fundamental features of Wikipedia is that everything is on the record, even deletions. The page or edit may be gone but the "why when and who" of the deletion remains "on file" forever - as it should be. I fail to see how the existence of archive pages "makes browsing difficult" particularly if you're not actually interested in the content of the archive pages - just how do they actually clutter any of the stuff you do want to see? Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 17:08, 24 July 2014 (UTC)
• Strongest Oppose Possible - Archives are essential here and help with alot of things, (AFDs, SPIs etc), Plus they're a part of history here. –Davey2010 • (talk) 21:05, 24 July 2014 (UTC)

(Moved from

• See
  WP:NOT#NEWS. The short answer is that we do ask people to wait for events to be notable before creating articles - sometimes that will be immediate apparent (as in the case of a commercial airliner crashing (regardless of cause), and making the article then and there is correct; other times, the event may not be easily notable and could take some time for its effects to ripple through. That said, our past approaches to articles created on immediately-developing news topics has been praised before, so it's just a matter of making sure the collaboration of editors is there and having admin eyes on articles to deal with problematic editors. I doubt we can ever have a ban on creation of articles of current events otherwise. —MASEM (t
  ) 05:38, 20 July 2014 (UTC)

• I think we should until a week after the event gains notability. No one respects
  WP:NOTNEWS, that I've seen, when it comes to current events articles. The aeroplane crash article that I referenced has been protected, praise God, but only after a mob of editors came in concerned about the article being "outdated". RGloucester — ☎
  16:18, 20 July 2014 (UTC)

• The protection has nothing to do with disputes regarding notability so that's irrelevant here. Also, notnews covers routine news coverage not every event the news happens to cover. Nowhere does it say that current events can't be notable. I don't see creation of article about a notable current event as even remotely being a case of disrespect, merely a case where people disagree with the suggestion that notnews prevents any coverage of current events.—67.68.162.111 (talk) 05:05, 21 July 2014 (UTC)

Mr IP, I never said that this event wasn't notable. I said that we should delay writing articles, even for certainly notable events, for some time after they happen, perhaps a week. This would prevent the tendency towards sensationalism, news reporting, and cruft. We should take a historical approach, as is proper for an encyclopaedia, and this is impossible to do whilst an event is happening. We are not a news source. We shouldn't treat the starting point of our current events articles as such. Right now, they are essentially rolling news stories until after the dust has settled. RGloucester — ☎ 04:09, 23 July 2014 (UTC)

• I think
  WP:NOTNEWS
  , followed by a link to the proper WikiNews page. This soft redirect could be given temporary Protected status. Once a consensus were reached that there was enough reliable, verifiable information available about the subject on which to base an article that would be appropriate for an encyclopedia, the soft redirect to Wikinews could then be replaced with that article, and the protection downgraded from Protected to Semi-protected, and eventually to Unprotected when consensus supports this.

⋮

In addition to the above, consider the following quotes:

Editors are encouraged to write about breaking news events in Wikinews instead of in Wikipedia.
— 

WP:BREAKING#Wikinews

Wikinews has . . . had issues with maintaining a separate identity from Wikipedia, which also covers major news events in real time. Columnist Jonathan Dee of The New York Times pointed out in 2007 that "So indistinct has the line between past and present become that Wikipedia has inadvertently all but strangled . . . Wikinews. . . . On bigger stories there's just no point in competing with the ruthless purview of the encyclopedia."
— Wikinews#Criticism

A welcome side effect of implementing something like the soft-redirect system described above is that it would leverage the torrent of intense interest arising from important breaking news events to inject a great deal of new attention, interest, and vitality into the Wikinews project. Nothing wrong with that, eh? — Jaydiem (talk) 19:40, 22 July 2014 (UTC)

I would like to see more people using Wikinews particularly for "minor" news stories (for example, various public transportation accidents) that aren't yet established as notable; if they do become notable, they can be transwikied/brought into en.wiki, but otherwise it keeps these to what Wikinews was for. But there are also stories where there is zero question that after some time we will have an encyclopedic article about it - eg irregardless of the cause, the crash of MH17 and its passengers would have gotten an article, period. We shouldn't attempt to stymie creation of these. But if one is unsure if the long-term implications of a news article will be worthy of a en.wiki article, they should be taking that to WIkinews. --MASEM (t) 19:49, 22 July 2014 (UTC)

Hello fellow Wikipedians! I've thought of something while I was on Wikipedia. Why don't we had a prefix to bots, for example you would have

MrWooHoo Because getting a new namespace for Bots, having a login that works differently than the standard login, and having an botuser experience that works differntly than regular user experience is not really worth the effort that we can get when the bot operator slaps a few bot templates on the user page and calls it a day. Hasteur (talk) 02:06, 17 July 2014 (UTC)

Prefixes are normally used for organizing portions of the project (templates, users, project discussions, etc); bots ARE users, thus we have them in the User: namespace. For most bots, we generally require them to have an obvious bot-like name, and generally do not allow normal users to have such names. Adding a new namespace just to host these <500 user accounts wouldn't have any benefits, and requiring the user names to have a namespace-looking name would be confusing. If the community wants a stricter naming convention then suffixing "(bot)" to a username would be more maintainable. (

WP:BAG member). — xaosflux ^Talk

02:52, 17 July 2014 (UTC)

Interesting proposal. I might support it as a way to improve clarity over which kind of user (bot or human) made an edit. However I notice that the history page does not show this prefix anyway, so you would still have to click the name to find out whether it was a bot. Perhaps it would be simpler to propose that "bot" is shown more clearly on the history page for f=edits by flagged bots? There would be major changes needed to the software to support your proposal, so probably not worth it. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 11:42, 18 July 2014 (UTC)

Complexity aside, I kinda like this proposal, though I'm unsure what benefit it would serve other than better organization. — Frεcklεfσσt | Talk 13:12, 18 July 2014 (UTC)

I am immediately reminded of the convention adopted in the fictional universe of

Isaac Asimov's robot novels, in which the name of all robots begins with the initial R., as in R. Daneel Olivaw. I suppose that on Wikipedia, an analogous policy could be established whereby all "bot" accounts have names that either begin or end with a consistent identifier, such as Bot_~, ~Bot, or ~ (bot). Of course, measures would also need to be taken to ensure that non-bot accounts do not use names that satisfy the naming convention for bot accounts. I'm curious, is there a registry of bot accounts somewhere? How many such accounts presently have names that don't include "bot" or "Bot"? And conversely, how many non-bot accounts 'do' have "bot" in their names? — Jaydiem (talk

) 16:39, 24 July 2014 (UTC)

Here is the list of all accounts that currently have a bot-flag. From what I can see, the great, great majority of them has "bot" or "Bot" in their username. Of those that don't (less than a dozen, the majority are fairly obvious nonetheless because of their name ("MediaWiki message delivery", "Commons Delinker", "Wikipedia Signpost" etc) or are scripts-with-botflag and have the name of the specific script or function attached (AnkitAWB, Nomenclaturebrowser). Two 2006-bots use the prefix Robo- instead of suffix -bot. (RoboServien, RoboMaxCyberSem). The only two bot-flag-possessing accounts I could see that do not show someway in its name that it's a bot would be D6 and CanisRufus, and those two both are practically ancient (2004). (There -are- a few accounts-with-flag that have bot in their username in such a way one could overlook it, though, such as Bota47).

As to non-bots having bot in their names, depends on how you count it, I suppose. If you include username-blocked users, as well as former bots and bots that were created for a trial but never got approval, a fair lot. If you only include (once-upon-a-time) actively-editing users that are not nor have ever been bots... no easy way to check, but probably mostly in cases where it's a 'coincidental' part of their username (such as people using (part of) their real name, and they happen to be named Bota or Botak, or people being interested in the field of botany, etc.) Like I said, no easy way for me to check, though. AddWittyNameHere (talk) 18:22, 26 July 2014 (UTC)

On occasion, after I've looked at recent edits on my watchlist, I would like to turn the clock back to an earlier time, so that every later edit will again appear in my watchlist in bold (like an edit I have not yet reviewed).

Is there way to do that? Would it be easy to add a button to do that?

Thanks,

The original proposal page is at w:en:User:Geraldshields11/sandbox/Wikipedia likes Galactic exploration for Posterity

proposed by Gerald Shields geraldshields11

Wikipedia likes Galactic Exploration for Posterity

I propose building and launching micro satellites containing the good articles of Wikipedia into outer space. I propose to call the series of micro Satellites “Friendship”.

With the recent project to print out Wikipedia on 1,000 volumes of weighty paper tomes and travel the Earth with them as a display, I advocate to preserve the good articles for future Earth-descended generations and, possibly, alien civilizations. The project would consist of creating a micro satellite containing a non-volatile bubble memory chips wrapped in a sphere or American football-shaped photovoltaic panels powering a simple radio transmitter. The photovoltaic panels will power the radio and transmit only when the micro satellite will come close to a star. The radio signal will consisted on short beeps and long pauses. The radio signal will start with one beep then a pause, then two beeps then a pause until ten beeps then a pause before repeating one beep and so on.

The name was inspired by a

1. Form a Galactic Exploration committee to handle a kick starter campaign to fund the building of the micro satellite.
2. Get permissions to launch the satellites.
3. Get permission to use a NASA sounding rocket, such as
   Black Brant XII
   , launched from Brazil
4. The micro satellite will be built by
   ham radio operators or makers
   in Maryland.
5. Request empty space on a launch vehicle to the ISS. One of the astronaut will throw the pico satellite in the direction of outside of the plane of eclipse. In the alternative, launch the satellite into one of the
   Lagrange points
   .

• It may increase name recondition of Wikimedia and its subcomponents.
• It may increase STEM coolness.
• If found by the Earth-descended, in the far future, then it may act as a Rosetta Stone for historians.
• Star Trek fans may be recruited to improve articles to good status.
• It may increase the coolness and hipness of NASA, "intended to be an introductory flight opportunity to provided exposure to, and spark interest in, space based science missions" similar to 41.110 UO KOEHLER/COLORADO SPACE GRANT 6-26-2014.

Detriments

• Aliens may use the knowledge gained from Wikipedia to conquer Earth, similar to the warnings of L. Ron Hubbard's book Battlefield Earth and Stephen Hawking.

Spokespersons

A male and a female because, similar to newscasters to reach a wider audience, they use a male and female.

1. The male should be w:en:user:geraldshields11.
2. The female is to be decided in the future.

 The heard of ostriches votes we put our heads under ground

Context: In my activities as a Articles for Creation volunteer I frequently come across new users who register with a name that is somewhat connected to the topic they are contributing on (See User talk:Hasteur#Username warning on AustralianThreston). It has been my understanding that if you can infer a conflict of interest from the user name connected to the subjects they are contributing on (i.e. AustrailianThreston cotributing a significant amount of coverage on the family name Threston [1]) that we should notify the user of their conflict of interest and that their username may constitute a promotional username and therefore against policy.

I propose that we create a fork of the {{Uw-coi-username}} template that reduces the corporate aspects of the warning template, but still maintains the COI and "May be against username policy" portion. Ideally I would like to see the same hidden categories to flag the talk page for extra consideration by experienced users/administrators to determine if preventative activities need to take place. Hasteur (talk) 16:53, 16 July 2014 (UTC)

@WikiDan61: as the user who opposed my usage of the current template repeatedly I'm giving you heads up that I'm forming this idea. Hasteur (talk) 16:53, 16 July 2014 (UTC)

I like the idea, but why not create a parameter for {{uw-coi-username}} instead of forking it? Jackmcbarn (talk) 17:01, 16 July 2014 (UTC)

I disagree with this idea. The COI username policy exists to prevent usernames that represent organizations or companies. It is a violation of username policy to create a name such as MicrosoftMarketing, not because that name implies an inherent conflict of interest but because it implies that the name is shared by more than one person. It is not a violation of username policy to create a name such as JohnInMicrosoftMarketing, because that name represents a single person. The fact that this person likely has a significant COI where Microsoft products is involved is obvious, and his announcement of said COI is actually beneficial to the community. In the case that Hasteur has pointed out, we have a user in Australia whose surname is likely Threston, who has done some research on his family history and would like to share the results with the rest of the Wikipedia readership. The fact that this user's edits may be biased to give a more favorable history of his family than we might otherwise want is announced by his name, and his edits might be given extra scrutiny because of this, but the username still represents a single person and therefore does not violate any policy. I do not believe we need or want a template to warn users about such issues. WikiDan61^ChatMe!_ReadMe!! 17:02, 16 July 2014 (UTC)

So that I have you on record, you disagree with Wikipedia:Username policy#Promotional names specifically A user who both adopts a promotional username and also engages in inappropriately promotional behaviors in articles about the company, group, or product, can be blocked. In such cases, administrators should examine the user's edits to decide whether or not to allow them to create a new username. ... Users who adopt such usernames, but who are not editing problematically in related articles, should not be blocked. Instead, they should be gently encouraged to change their username. which is policy and not the nuanced "UW-COI-USERNAME only applies to Corporate naming". The policy as it is written and in text appears to support my view that the intersection of the user's name and the subject matter they've elected to write about raises enough concern that they are here to promote the family name. Hasteur (talk) 17:11, 16 July 2014 (UTC)

Also adding the template does not outright say that the username is a policy violation and that they're editing in conflict of interest, rather that the is cause for concern about the username the user has selected and the subject matter they've decided to contribute to. While I will concede the point that the current uw-coi-username template focuses more on the username side of the equation, the template I invision focuses more on the "I think you might have a conflict of interest based on what you've edited and the username you've chosen". Hasteur (talk) 17:19, 16 July 2014 (UTC)

@Jackmcbarn: I am proposing the fork in the template because having a simple template invocation is easier to handle (especially with tools such as Twinkle) as opposed to the parameter that is passed along. Hasteur (talk) 17:14, 16 July 2014 (UTC)

@

coi}} template that explains that users should avoid editing topics with which they have a conflict of interest. In the case at hand, adding an explanatory note that you recognize the COI based on the user's name and their selection of articles to edit would be sufficient, without adding any indications that the user's username might be problematic. In the case at hand, the user actually did apply for a username change based on the provided warning, and the name change was denied because no policy violation was found. WikiDan61^ChatMe!_ReadMe!!

18:15, 16 July 2014 (UTC)

COI-username is not just about

WP:NOSHARE problems. "User:Buy these Widgets from me, a single individual!" is also a violation. WhatamIdoing (talk

) 19:23, 16 July 2014 (UTC)

(

WP:RELEVANCE and a great host more of policies/guidelines/best practices that the user should be warned about. If you have no further arguments, I'm going to assume that you're in the negative category, but based on Jackmcbarn's commentary it seems reasonable that this should be created.Hasteur (talk

) 19:29, 16 July 2014 (UTC)

OK, so let's agree that

WP:CONSENSUS works. WikiDan61^ChatMe!_ReadMe!!

21:38, 16 July 2014 (UTC)

Your obstinance astounds me. I'm not saying that they will need to change their username. What I'm saying the template will be used for(and that you've elected to overlook multiple times) is that "the user's editing coupled with the username that they've chosen has raised concern that their editing may be pushing a promotional PoV". Obviously it's the tagging editor's responisbility to carefully judge if the warning/notice is needed for the instance, and it's the reviewing editor (or admin) that passes a secondary judgement if additional protective measures need to be enacted. I dump your viewpoint in the bit bucket because you clearly aren't seeing the difference between the baseline COI-username template and the one I'm proposing. Hasteur (talk) 23:22, 16 July 2014 (UTC)

The name "AustralianThreston" was totally fine. Aren't you looking for simply {{uw-coi}}? –xeno^talk 11:00, 17 July 2014 (UTC)

xeno No I'm not (for the 9th time)... If the user has been contributing articles about the Threston family name with the username RandomUser4618, I wouldn't have thought anything, but because the user registered as AustralianThreston and contributed articles about the family name is enough to trip the Promotional POV alarm and the question if the username implies a significant amount of non-NPOV with respect to this user-interest area. And for the record this is probably the 9th case like this I've seen this since January. Previously I've used uw-coi-username to flag down attention (with a eventual 90% blocking rate) and it's only when one user continuously disagrees that is causing me to desire a forked template from uw-coi-username because the coi-username focuses heavily on the CORPNAME aspect only of username policy. Hasteur (talk) 11:53, 17 July 2014 (UTC)

You are suggesting the editor may need to exercise caution when editing articles regarding his surname. This shouldn't lead to him receiving any kind of "username" warning. You could always explain, 'the reason I left you this uw-coi note is your username implies you may have a conflict of interest' or somesuch. But what does the username itself have anything to do with it? If he renames himself to RandomUser4618, it doesn't do anything to resolve a COI. But why do you think this user needs any kind of templated notice? They appear to be editing in good faith. Basically, I agree broadly with WikiDan above. The user should indeed be counseled about adv/n/coi/npov/relevance, but the username doesn't really come into the equation in these cases. –xeno^talk 13:23, 17 July 2014 (UTC)

@Xeno: Wow... that's just... wow... What the templated notice would say (paraphrased) is "You may have a conflict of interest based both on your username chosen and the subject matter you have chosen to edit. Your edits have been flagged for extra scrutiny by other editors/administrators to determine if preventative measures needed to be taken with respect to your editing." As I said above to WikiDan, I'm not saying that they will need to change their username, only that their choice in username coupled with the subject matter they've chosen to edit has aroused suspicion about their goals in editing here. Hasteur (talk) 14:41, 17 July 2014 (UTC)

I'm sorry I just don't see why {{subst:Uw-coi|reason=Your username caused me to believe there may be a conflict of interests.}} (or similar) doesn't serve the purpose for which you are looking. As this is the idea lab, I'll withdraw from the further development of this idea. –xeno^talk 14:49, 17 July 2014 (UTC)

Sorry for apparently following this discussion around, but I don't think Xeno is out to lunch here. Asking users to pick a new name solely because a name can allow us to make an inference that they'll edit with a COI doesn't actually resolve the problem we want resolved. Further, a rename (whether the new editor knows it or not) will remove the bulk of that scrutiny without, by itself, resolving the problem we truly care about (COI editing). Protonk (talk) 14:58, 17 July 2014 (UTC)

Bah... you all are a bunch of Ostriches with your heads in the ground. Fine... Prepare for an onslaught of uw-coi templates where some of the evidence is the username the user has chosen. Hasteur (talk) 15:26, 17 July 2014 (UTC)

"The heard of ostriches votes we put our heads under ground" LOL. C'mon. If you're gonna talk shit about your peers at least spell it right. Protonk (talk) 15:36, 17 July 2014 (UTC)

By the way deniers (xeno—Protonk—WikiDan61) I'm not the only editor who attempted to use the {{uw-coi-username}} template in this maner [2]. So now you want to go after Chris troutman for using the template the wrong way? Hasteur (talk) 18:09, 17 July 2014 (UTC)

"deniers"? What am I denying? I just chimed in with one comment here noting that Xeno made a good point with respect to the conflation of COI edits and COI usernames and the fact that we have a good set of tools for the latter which maybe don't do what they need to do on the former. Nobody here is the enemy. I'm certainly not going to "go after" anyone, where on earth did that come from? Protonk (talk) 18:16, 17 July 2014 (UTC)

Since I was mentioned, I've been mulling over my reply. No, I don't think AustralianThreston's username really has to be changed and maybe I've misused that template in the past. I wholeheartedly agree with Hasteur that the message "Your choices in editing coupled with your username could be problematic and is being flagged for scrutiny" is what we're trying to communicate. I've seen several usernames that looked fine until you look at their edit history and do a little research. I support forking the template because while corporate editors still exist (I hurt their feelings everyday at the AfC help desk) there are a profusion of partisans and POV pushers that exclaim their COI thanks to their username. Wikipedia has a real collective blind-spot on this issue. Too many Wikipedians are concerned about paid editing and business promotion while they completely ignore the grassroots editors that will import their own brand of crazy for free. AustralianThreston is just a good-faith contributor that's excited to write about an apparent distant relation. I think there is a COI issue there that ought to be addressed, not that the user name is offensive, disruptive, etc.

Somewhat off-topic, the smartest idea I've heard lately is that new registered users should be assigned a random username and have to pass 300 un-reverted edits before they select their own. Many new users could use the time to carefully consider what to call themselves and it prevents the ongoing of UAA traffic because of some prospective editors that don't know better. Chris Troutman (talk) 20:53, 18 July 2014 (UTC)

And greatly after the fact, the user in question AustralianThreston (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log) has gotten themselves indeffed for making a legal threat in the context of defending one of their walled garden of articles. Hasteur (talk) 11:16, 1 August 2014 (UTC)

Chatroom

I can't be the only editor who would welcome a Wikipedia chatroom, can I ? SmokeyTheCat 15:38, 28 July 2014 (UTC)

That's kinda sorta what the Village Pumps are, no? — Frεcklεfσσt | Talk 16:29, 28 July 2014 (UTC)

There's a couple IRC channels for Wikipedia (WP:IRC). Chris857 (talk) 16:54, 28 July 2014 (UTC)

Village Pumps,

WP:NOTFORUM. --Redrose64 (talk

) 17:58, 28 July 2014 (UTC)

Surely just wanting to chat to other editors doesn't constitute a forum? Just more of a community. I've been an editor here a long time and I don't feel like part of a community. Do other editors? SmokeyTheCat 06:25, 30 July 2014 (UTC)

• @SmokeyTheCat: I'm not sure precisely what you have in mind when you mention a "chatroom"—an IRC channel? a web forum? something else?—but anything that would help promote collegiality and friendliness among Wikipedia editors would surely be a good thing. Can you sketch out what you imagine an ideal "chatroom" for Wikipedia would be like? How would editors find out about it, and what would entice them to spend time in it? What would they talk about? How would it be organized? What would be its guiding principles and purpose? — Jaydiem (talk) 02:14, 1 August 2014 (UTC)
• Possibly you can be... Personally I won't go near IRC and have only ever been in a chatroom twice. Once to type some things in for a friend who was otherwise engaged in combating famine with pizza and coffee, and the other to wind her up on a different chatroom when she thought I didn't know where it was. Who's going to moderate it, or do you plan to let it be anarchy? Is it going to be part of Wikipedia, WikiMedia, or on a chatroom site? I feel part of a community in that I have friends (on and off wiki), and there are people I don't give a shit about one way or another, and people I can't stand (not many - there's probably more that hate me...). Peridon (talk) 16:59, 2 August 2014 (UTC)

If you get involved with people by talk page stalking and watching (and helping and commenting), you get chat that way. Otherwise, get on with your job or we'll dock your wages.... 8-( Peridon (talk) 17:01, 2 August 2014 (UTC)

Wikimedian input to digital democracy

tl:dr - Wikimedia UK and Demos are looking to community-source a submission to the Speaker's Commission on Digital Democracy and we need your help! Get involved here

Recently the Speaker of the House of Commons established a commission to investigate the opportunities digital technology can bring for parliamentary democracy in the UK. This consultation is a public exercise which attempts to explore various themes relating to digital democracy.

Wikimedia UK and Demos, working with Wikimedians, have been exploring whether the norms and values of the Wikimedia community can be applied to this kind of consultation, especially the consensus-based approach to writing and enacting Wikipedia policy.

The experiment has been going well and led to a community-sourced submission to the first theme which was looking at how technology can facilitate better scrutiny of the work of Parliament. You can view this submission here – https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Connecting_knowledge_to_power:_the_future_of_digital_democracy_in_the_UK_(Archive_1). The talk page is also worth a look as the discussion offered some really useful insights into how the content was reached.

However, we need your help. The second theme of the consultation has now been published and it is about digital representation. We would love for as many people to take part in this exercise as possible. The Commission was really appreciative of the efforts of the community first time around and it would be great to come up with another excellent community-driven submission. You can view the questions that are being asked, and participate in creating the submission, here.

A third theme will follow in the next couple of months and a similar approach will be taken then. Finally, once the Commission closes for submissions, Demos and Wikimedia UK will write up a comprehensive report on the process and what we have learned which we will, of course, make available to the community.

Thank you for any and all help, it is very much appreciated. Stevie Benton (WMUK) (talk) 15:41, 28 July 2014 (UTC)

@Stevie Benton: Can't 'get involved' there - link doesn't take you to an existing page - or do we have to set up our own? Peridon (talk) 16:49, 2 August 2014 (UTC)

New articles being created when a draft is in progress

Dear editors: There are now over 11,000 pages in the Draft: namespace!!! There are also over 21,000 more in "Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation", and the most promising of these are gradually being moved to Draft. It's becoming quite frequent for a draft to be well-developed, but for another user to make a mainspace article about the same topic, unaware of the draft. How can we minimize this? Are there help pages that should include a suggestion about searching the Draft: namespace before beginning a new article?

WP:Your first article

comes to mind, but it will only catch new users. There are many, many editors who learned how to make articles before the Draft: space existed and may not be aware of it. It's pretty easy to make a custom search for draft articles:

Find Draft articles [[Draft:]]

Any suggestions? —Anne Delong (talk) 18:36, 24 July 2014 (UTC)

• Sure. You're familiar, of course, with the standard "Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name" page that's displayed when someone attempts to view a nonexistent article (for example, click here). Why not edit the template for that page to add a script that (1) checks to see if article namespace is being viewed; (2) if so, checks to see if a page of the same attempted name, but in Draft: namespace, exists; and (3) if so, displays some kind of notification (perhaps an infobox) to alert the viewer to the existence of the Draft: article, provide a hyperlink thereto, and invite the viewer to go check it out?

⋮

If such a script isn't feasible, then a link to search Draft: namespace could easily be added to the nonexistent-article page template, alongside the existing "Search for '________' in existing articles" link. — Jaydiem (talk) 22:39, 30 July 2014 (UTC)

Thanks, Jaydiem. That's a great suggestion. —Anne Delong (talk) 01:53, 31 July 2014 (UTC)

I second that. Best thing I've seen here in a long while. The 'check availability' thing on the unblock for name change template does a search and comes up with the closest match to the requested name. Might be some help. There probably won't be a way to stop people creating new articles about subjects we've already got articles about, though. Things like [F. Bloggs] when we've already got [Fred Bloggs] and a redirect from [Frederick Bloggs] (not to mention [Fred Bloggs (poacher)] who was [Fred Blogg]'s second cousin once removed... (single brackets intended) Peridon (talk) 17:11, 2 August 2014 (UTC)

Yes, or course, but a fair number of duplications could be avoided by just making people aware that there may be a draft in progress, making it easy for them to search for one, and adding a sentence or so of encouragement to improve the existing draft if one is found. —Anne Delong (talk) 22:23, 3 August 2014 (UTC)

The search template is MediaWiki:Searchmenu-new (there's also MediaWiki:Searchmenu-new-nocreate; not sure when that version gets used). Adding a link to "draft page of the same title" there would be relatively simple. Andrew Gray (talk) 23:03, 3 August 2014 (UTC)

• I will say that the AFC search is not the most intuitive system atm, at least for me, and maybe making that more accessible and known might allow for less duplication. Jab843 (talk) 02:54, 5 August 2014 (UTC)

To what search are you referring, Jab843? —Anne Delong (talk) 03:29, 5 August 2014 (UTC)

Anne Delong I am more referring to the fact that it is difficult to go through the queue of ones that have been submitted for review, as opposed to the ones that just have the template.... Unless I am missing something? Jab843 (talk) 03:33, 5 August 2014 (UTC)

Jab843, the old search would not look at text inside templates, so it was difficult to search only the ones that were currently up for review. However, the new search, if enabled in your preferences, will indeed do this, provided that you include text that is unique to the submission template. Once you have the new search installed (it's under "beta"), try typing 'football "review waiting"' into the search box above, and you should see a number of articles which contain the word football and also are up for review. However, that is NOT what is wanted for editors who are creating new articles - they need to see the declined ones and the not-yet-submitted ones as well, to prevent duplication of effort. —Anne Delong (talk) 03:58, 5 August 2014 (UTC)

PS - if you just want to see all (about 2000 right now) articles that have been submitted for review, they are displayed at Category:Pending AfC submissions, arranged by date of submission. —Anne Delong (talk) 04:14, 5 August 2014 (UTC)

Perennial proposal to autosign talkpage posts

Hey I have an idea. While mw:flow takes its time being deployed across *.wik*.org, why not get rid of the yada yada about "signing your posts"? Change the software so that it signs the end of the last paragraph that you add in talk pages. It doesn't insert your signature if you do something without adding a paragraph. Of course there would also be a new "Sign" checkbox that is checked by default that you can uncheck if you want to add a paragraph without signing or if you want to add a "custom" signature or something.

Much better than the lame ass bot with a

lame ass name running around calling people "unsigned" like they're some sort of crooks. It could also be opt out for the folks who really wanna type 4 crappy ~'s every time they state an opinion. I can't imagine an IP contributor appreciating having to do that. -- 内なるサクラ

05:14, 31 July 2014 (UTC) edited 05:25, 31 July 2014 (UTC)

Also, I'm new here. In the WP namespace that is. So once this "idea" is complete, where does it go? To

wp:vpt? -- 内なるサクラ

05:20, 31 July 2014 (UTC)

The simple reason is that not all talk contributions can be signed automatically and end up in a sensible place, so it's just best to leave it to the individual contributor to take responsibility for their talk page contributions by signing them however works best for their particular contribution. Plus, no IP in the history of Wikipedia has ever been forced to type in any tildes if they don't want to because we have a bot that does it for them. But like you said, Flow is going to be implemented in talk spaces eventually, so there's really very little return on this at all. It's stupid to change everything around, forcing all the editors who have been productive on here for years to adapt to an alteration in something so basic as signing your talk page posts, only to have it all revamped in the coming years anyway. But in the end, it's your peurile attack on the name of the bot that performs this thankless task that makes it impossible to take you seriously. So I suggest you go back outside and enjoy the cherry blossoms, and let the wonderful sinebot clean up behind you if you really find it that onerous to type that ~~~~. VanIsaac_WS^cont 05:51, 31 July 2014 (UTC)

• "not all talk contributions can be signed automatically". True. But the option of 4 ~s should remain as well and the software should be programmed to not sign something twice. Besides, how much more complicated can sinebot's own algorithm be than what I've proposed above? (A comment by user:slakr would be welcome.) It'll be as simple as replacing anti-vandal bots with edit filters. Anyway, give me an example where an auto signature would not "end up in a sensible place". I'm not challenging you, just asking you, coz I can't think of one.
• "in the history of Wikipedia" (emph added). Are you sure?
• "we have a bot that does it for them". My whole problem with sinebot is that it is forced to add a sign that is not really a sign (preceding unsigned comment in subscript) because it does it later and as a separate edit.
• "there's really very little return on this at all". That's a matter of perspective (unless you're a dev and you think it's a big ass change).
• "forcing all the editors who have been productive on here for years to adapt to an alteration in something so basic". I should have made this clear. No alteration. If you put the sign yourself, MediaWiki shouldn't do anything. Only a new checkbox that has to be unchecked if they want to add a paragraph and not sign it (doing instead whatever "works best for their particular contribution"). Currently the only way to do this is to opt out of sinebot's services which isn't an option for IPs.
• "in the coming years" (emph added). That's a long time, considering that Wikipedia isn't even old enough to drive. "peurile"? What slang is that? "impossible"? I hope you're kidding, coz I was. "cherry blossoms"? Nice!
• "let the wonderful sinebot clean up". I think I'll take that advice this time. I don't find it "onerous", but I do find it a bit "geeky" (and I'm sure plenty of others do too) to have to end your post with that. I mean, a talk page is pretty much the only place where you can get away without using any wiki markup and this thing seems like it's almost there just to remind you that you're typing wiki text. And lots and lots of new users know it but forget it.
• And one more thing. The show preview option will show your signature so it's not like the automatic signature's gonna show up someplace unexpected and surprise you. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Iiar (talk • contribs) 07:19, 31 July 2014 (UTC)

• One other thing I don't understand is why people object to implementing one feature of Flow while not being against Flow itself. I concede that an auto signing change in MediaWiki will take its own time to implement and then roll out. But it's bound to be much swifter and more successful than Flow. — 内なるサクラ (Iiar) 08:11, 31 July 2014 (UTC)

@Iiar: "Currently the only way to do this is to opt out of sinebot's services which isn't an option for IPs." Question: Why should IPs be allowed not to sign? Complex and possibly "drama-inducing" stuff like talk page refactoring should be left for experienced editors. Note that I'm not stating that IPs are all inexperienced, but it's better to play safe since most of them are new. But anyway, this is a nice suggestion, and can be easily implemented with a client-side JavaScript (So editors can opt-in or opt-out from this freely) which fetches the user's (custom) signature via ResourceLoader (Use mw.user.options.get("nickname")) and appends it if the user forgets to use the four tildes. Zhaofeng Li [talk... contribs...] 00:24, 1 August 2014 (UTC)

Got bored and made a proof-of-concept: User:Zhaofeng Li/SignMe.js. Just append this in your common.js: {{subst:iusc|User:Zhaofeng Li/SignMe.js}} and SignMe will appear in the Tools sidebar when editing. This signature is signed with the script: Zhaofeng Li [talk... contribs...] 01:33, 1 August 2014 (UTC)

Soooo, let me get this straight. And I quote: "No alteration. If you put the sign yourself, MediaWiki shouldn't do anything." You want things to work exactly how they do right now, except that instead of a bot doing it, something else does? Is it really your complaint that it happens to be a bot? I don't know how to even respond to a request like that. "Do the exact same thing as has always been done, except I don't like the particular piece of software that happens to do it, so I want wikimedia to write a completely new piece of software to do the exact same thing". Is there any reason whatsoever why this is not completely pointless? VanIsaac_WS^cont 02:53, 1 August 2014 (UTC)

Something tells me you're not a dev. Neither am I but at least I'm not using exclamatory phrases like "completely new piece of software" and "really very little return". Let me summarize the problem with the bot: it leaves a separate entry in the history and sometimes it has a heavy load, so it "signs" the post much later. Also because of this it's been written in such a way that it doesn't just insert your name after your post, but labels it "unsigned". On a more technical note Sinebot can't insert your exact signature because it doesn't know it! MediaWiki does. Of course you could argue that if you want to have a custom signature, just be careful to put the 4 ~s, which I will concede. But the change I am proposing is not really a new piece of software like you think. MediaWiki already has some code to substitute the 4 ~s with your signature and time stamp. The change would simply be to mod the code to do it even when the 4 ~s are not there, based on a simple version of sinebot's algorithm (like when you add a paragraph without cutting and pasting from somewhere else).

This is not "completely pointless" and not "the exact same thing" because 1) it'll be in the same edit as your post and not on a later separate edit, 2) it'll be your exact signature even if it's a custom signature and 3) it'll give you more control over when you don't want a post to be signed, even if you're an IP. So like it says on the top, please suggest any modifications to my idea. You can voice your opposition when I propose it at

wp:vpr

.

@Zhaofeng Li: Thank you! I'm thinking server side would be slightly better because if your browser adds the 4 ~s when you hit the "show preview" button, the input area below the preview would have them which would be just as ugly as if you'd typed them yourself. Anyway, we could propose an implementation in phases where it's opt-in initially (IPs will have to manually click the "Sign automatically" checkbox if they want to get away with not typing 4 ~s) and then opt-out. What do you think?-- 内なるサクラ (Iiar) 05:36, 1 August 2014 (UTC)

Personally, I'm against it. (I'm also dead against that great cock-up called Flow...) What if you are correcting a post, removing a post, or even correcting someone else's post? (Usually, I don't correct other people's posts, but there are one or two who are happy for me to tidy them up.) Just letting you know that there's at least one who will be opposing... Peridon (talk) 16:42, 2 August 2014 (UTC)

• Hate repeating myself but, only when you add a paragraph without cutting and pasting from somewhere else. 内なるサクラ (Iiar) 09:23, 5 August 2014 (UTC)

Changing the name of reviewers

I'm proposing a change to the name of reviewers. The permission to accept or reject pending changes is currently called the "reviewer" right. This has caused some misunderstandings of its purpose among new users who are eager to request this right when it's not actually needed for their work.^{1 2 and more} Also, there are many parts here involving "reviewing" (Peer review, GA/FA/DYK nominations, AfC submissions, etc), not just pending changes. "Pending changes reviewer" may be a more accurate name for this role (Different ideas anyone?). The name will replace "Reviewer" on policy pages and other user-facing elements, while the original name "reviewer" will be kept in the underlying code. What do you think about this? Zhaofeng Li [talk... contribs...] 07:37, 3 August 2014 (UTC)

I like this very much. Cheers and Thanks,

Talk Ping when replying

14:27, 6 August 2014 (UTC)

Simple solution to a problem, that requires very little on the dev side. I recommend this is moved over to

WP:VPP as soon as possible, as I fail to see (with AFT5 gone) what benefit there is to over generalising the title. If and when we want to bundle anyhting else into the group, then maybe we could revert back to the name at a later date. --Mdann52talk to me!

14:40, 6 August 2014 (UTC)

I will bring this to

Talk Ping when replying

15:04, 6 August 2014 (UTC)

Actually, seeing that devs are not involved at all(just renaming policy pages, etc., I'll take it to

Talk Ping when replying

15:09, 6 August 2014 (UTC)

Time to revisit schools?

This was an interesting discussion to review with good points raised on both sides. The outcome is not to proceed to a Wikipedia-wide RfC about our usual practice regarding secondary schools, but Risker's point that secondary schools' articles attract defamatory remarks and other content that violates our BLP principles is well made and I think it probably deserves more attention than it has received so far. I have personally observed extremely clear and troubling BLP violations in school articles, on occasion, and these have been the cause of most of my communications with oversighters over the years. Some schoolkids are not above accusing their teachers of all kinds of things in Wikipedia articles. Enough said.

Still, secondary schools are a sacred cow on Wikipedia and it would take a Wikipedia-wide RfC to change that. I can see no consensus to begin such a RfC in the discussion below.

I hope this helps.—S Marshall T/C 11:56, 6 August 2014 (UTC)

The following discussion 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.

---

I am getting seriously tired of all the, to be extremely blunt, crappy articles about this or that college, that because of the near automatic presumption of notability are littering Wikipedia. It's becoming rare for me to get through a single page of new articles on

NPP

without running into one or more of them. They are often completely unsourced and highly promotional. Even the one's that do have some sources, are often so poor and or obviously promotional that they would get nuked in an AfD discussion if the topic was anything other than schools. WHY ARE SCHOOLS A SACRED COW ON WIKIPEDIA?

I am considering putting up a proposal to require that all schools and colleges be subject to the exact same standards as any other topic, specifically significant coverage in multiple reliable sources to be considered notable. -Ad Orientem (talk) 16:02, 13 June 2014 (UTC)

It sounds like you need to take a break. You yourself could look for sources. For current schools there are almost always plenty of sources around, but they may be newspapers in languages that you don't know. However there could be lots of "colleges" which are just some private training company set up recently, without notability. These are the kind of article that should not have the presumption of notability. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 22:08, 13 June 2014 (UTC)

I think you are missing the point. As long as it can be established that a college exists, and that it's not a degree mill or something similar, then it is de-facto notable, extensive RS coverage or no. I also don't think it's right to attempt to shift the

burden for hunting down sources on editors who are dong NPP, though I don't mind a little here and there in most cases. But there is a widespread pattern of abuse going on with way too many school related articles that would in the normal course of things, not even come close to meeting our notability standards getting what amounts to a free pass. So I will ask the question again... Why are schools a sacred cow on Wikipedia? -Ad Orientem (talk

) 00:43, 14 June 2014 (UTC)

Because otherwise we will spend half our time at AfD debating the intricacies of just what sources are sufficiently "substantial" and "reliable", and will probably end up debating this not just for all the secondary school and colleges, but all the primary schools. Depending on whether you want to keep them or not, it is possible to interpret the sourcing requirements of the GNG to produce any wanted result for almost all articles of this nature. The current system is not, as you seem to think, an inclusive rule only, it is equally an exclusive rule, for not giving articles to primary schools, of which there are many times the number compared to secondary schools. The probable accuracy or even repeatability of our AfD determinations back 7 years ago was about 80% at most, meaning that almost any school could be removed after 4 or 5 afds, & those who wanted to avoid school articles did just such nominations. Simultaneously, those who wanted to keep the articles spent most of their time here on finding recondite secondary sources,which in general are available for most primary as well as secondary schools if you look hard enough, though it can take hours. And what's the point of it all? If, like now, we cover about 20 or 30% of secondary schools that would have trouble passing the GNG interpreted rigidly, WP is not paper; if we merge all the primary schools into the school districts as at present, the key links for the information are still available.

What we can not accommodate is wasting the energy of all of us interested in notability, inclusionist-minded and exculsionist-minded both, at these afds, when there are so many really harmful articles, especially promotional articles and poorly sourced BLPs, that we need to remove. It's a matter of practicality, not of principle.

The real problem here , is that similar decision points would be useful for many other types of articles, particularly those subject to

WP:LOCAL. where the same ambiguity of the detailed specifications of the GNG can yield any wanted result. (And again, with almost random results, except when do we have such convenient cut off points as local or state branches of national organizations.) DGG ( talk

) 02:35, 14 June 2014 (UTC)

• I'ld say, keep the policy for real schools and colleges, but make it clear that this policy does not apply to those wannabe commercial 'colleges' those are nothing more than fronts for paid training programs. (i.e. any organization can call itself a 'college', but only include for our policy those that fit the traditional description of a college. ) However, based on CSD criteria, we should also delete all articles that are blatant promotion and advertisement (G11. Unambiguous advertising or promotion), or are largely copied from the college's website or informational material (G12. Unambiguous copyright infringement). @Ad Orientem, perhaps that addresses your major concerns? Darx9url (talk) 00:53, 15 June 2014 (UTC)
• I agree with the sentiment behind the proposal, at least to a degree, in that a locale shouldn't be made continuously more granular by breaking out articles about other items within the locale unless there is substantial reliable material and independent notability. For schools we seem to have moved too far away from this and now presume that they all justify an independent article. Some of the school articles have no more sources available than my local bus stop does - a primary source website and a couple of minor mentions in the local press when a bus broke down there. I think
  talk
  ) 09:26, 17 June 2014 (UTC)
• I agree with Ad Orientem that this is out of control for new articles. We need to remove the exception to db-A7 to solve the initial filtering issue. Nothing else has exemption so why should schools be any different? I don't get the concept of why if a college/high school exists it is somehow automatically notable. This does not apply to any other type of building so its anomalous to say the least. That's the CSD part.
  

As for Afd,

WP:DEADLINE. "It might be long enough one day..." What we need are better guidelines.  Philg88 ^♦talk

10:02, 17 June 2014 (UTC)

• It's all volunteer work and while Wikipedia attempts to be encyclopedic, the only people researching such schools are likely going to people who either already went there, are going there, or are planning on enrolling there, it's not as if the low-quality information people provide is going to be used in anything scholarly or, well, serious. If the subject matter were serious, I'd say we need to be more proactive in eliminating low-quality pages which might very well be nothing short of promotion or propaganda, but it sounds like what you're evaluating is pretty uninportant. I'd say there's no problem that needs to be addressed, just a desire for better quality which is difficult to achieve since we're all volunteers. Damotclese (talk) 16:56, 17 June 2014 (UTC)
• You know, it's all well and good to have this "standard" to which DGG refers, and I see his point about how it would be a time sink; however, this "notability standard" put into place well before the BLP policy really took hold. Almost without exception, the high school articles are huge magnets for BLP violations, and most of them really are only notable locally. I think perhaps it's time to start considering whether it's useful to have thousands of articles nobody's really watching on (at best) borderline notable subjects that are used as attack vectors against individual high school students, teachers and principals. Risker (talk) 00:20, 25 June 2014 (UTC)

Risker risker, I understand your argument, but the more notable they are, the more of a magnet, because they;ll be the larger schools with the more students, and thus the more prospective potential abusive editors. We should be able to deal with this in other ways, like an edit filter. DGG ( talk ) 01:11, 25 June 2014 (UTC)

One might think, DGG, but my experience is that it is the high schools with under 1200 students, often in small communities/suburbs or rural areas, that experience the greatest level of vandalism, sometimes to the level that suppression is needed. (As a matter of course, if I need to suppress edits to a school article, I automatically apply a one-year semi-protection, since by the time the oversighters are called in, there is usually months worth of nastiness.) A lot of these schools would barely pass GNG, if that; all of their coverage is local (and usually sports-related), they usually have no notable alumni, and most of their information comes from the school website, schoolboard website, and the results of statewide tests if applicable. This is the reality for the majority of high schools in North America: they're no more notable than grade schools. But they get a lot more vandalism and revenge editing, almost all of it BLP-related. Risker (talk) 03:44, 25 June 2014 (UTC)

• For what it's worth, my personal view is that the great majority of schools covered by Wikipedia are not in any way notable. Please note that I am in the UK and will choose my examples accordingly; it should be obvious that the same concepts can be applied elsewhere.

My reasoning is this: (to a first approximation) we regard a person as notable if they have accomplished something that makes them stand out from the crowd; in the same way, we might therefore regard a school as notable if it has accomplished something that makes it significantly different from the vast mass of schools. Thus, we might regard a school as notable if it

Edinburgh Fringe

, apparently!), but the references for what we might, in a better Wikipedia, call non-notable schools are generally restricted to local newspapers and government lists ("a comprehensive list of comprehensives"!).

The problem is driven by several factors, none easy to change. First, there are always going to be people who don't like the idea that their school wasn't notable. Second, there is the general problem of Wiki-notability, which is prepared to accept very poor references, most of which prove existence rather than notability. Third, I took the liberty of reviewing some schools AfD debates from the archives. It's easy to see that there was/is a clear clique of Wikipedians who took the general view that all schools are notable, and a rather larger clique who took the somewhat less extreme position that all secondary schools are notable. From what I can work out, this view was taken for two main reasons, which, paraphrased, are: one, that schools are notable in their own communities, and, two, that it was judgmental, unfair, or otherwise invidious to ascribe notability to some schools but not to others. It's not obvious to me that these contributors formed a majority of Wikipedia's editors, but they certainly formed a majority in AfD debates, which in any case are biased towards retention. It's a cliché that a small determined group can accomplish its aim when it is opposed by a larger but less generally determined one, and this appears to be what has happened with schools: enough precedents have been set that secondary schools, at least, are now automatically notable.

I feel that in a perfect world we would not have so many schools in Wikipedia, but I find it useful to think in terms of a heresy: Wikipedia isn't a real encyclopedia. It's an immensely useful resource, and if I need information about a particular manga character or disused railway station it's ideal, but it certainly isn't definitive. A "real" encyclopedia aspires to reliable coverage of significant matters, but this isn't what happens here. Although I haven't any idea of the statistics, I'd guess we have many more editors fascinated by

Akkadians

. We do not apply any judgment about what matters and what does not. In this, we are not like a "real" (or, if you prefer, "traditional") encyclopedia. We are inclusive and non-judgmental. In this, we are simply reflecting the way our society behaves. Similarly, again like larger society, we do not distinguish between verifiable truth and matters of opinion. (I recently found an edit to an article that mentioned cheese-eating etiquette; its source was a blog, but I quickly found that journalists and bloggers had copied the Wikipedia article, sometimes word-for-word, so it's only a matter of time before we have a "reliable source" for this nonsense!) Further, I'm not a particularly hard-core editor, but even I've seen plenty of articles that have been swamped by biased contributors, or deleted because this or that claque disapproved, or (worse) not deleted because nobody has assessed the article. The vastness of Wikipedia makes it inevitable that individual articles will contain errors, and the best we can do is to fight the continual battle against those. And, as has been remarked above, it's probably better to focus on improving the important articles, and leave the articles on non-notable topics to those who care about them.

I suppose what I'm trying to say is that whilst I feel you're right, it's a battle that's already been lost. The schools articles are here, they're mostly out of date and they're mostly about non-notable subjects, but they're here and we have to live with it. From time to time I amuse myself by going through a school article, updating the name of the head teacher, and correcting the spelling mistakes, but there's not much else that can be done.

On the plus side, it's nice to know that there are other people who share my reservations about our schools articles. On the minus side, the precedent is clear, and I think we just have to live with it. I think we probably help Wikipedia most by working on the areas where we can make a positive contribution. RomanSpa (talk) 12:00, 27 June 2014 (UTC)

@RomanSpa... That is a very good and thoughtful post that touches on some of the concerns I have had. One possible, and admittedly imperfect, solution to the question of all the already existing articles is to just give them some sort of limited pass if we decide to tighten the standards. For instance, we might say that any articles about a high school or secondary school created before the revised guidelines come into effect are exempt, provided they cite at least one reliable source. -Ad Orientem (talk) 14:29, 27 June 2014 (UTC)

I see your reasoning, I think, but I'm not comfortable with the arbitrariness. It seems odd that of two otherwise almost identical schools, one might have a Wikipedia article and the other not, just because one was started before some arbitrary date while the other was started later. It also doesn't solve the problem of all the existing non-notable schools. One option that I've pondered in the past would imitate the real world like this: in my parents' house there are a huge number of books, more or less arranged by subject, including two book-cases that together form what might be called the "reference section". There is, of course, a full set of the Encyclopedia Britannica, but next to it there are a whole lot of other reference works, including the usual dictionaries and atlases and what-have-you. There are also a large number of directories, including a large and tastefully-bound directory of all the private schools in the UK (dated back several decades!), and assorted directories of specialist institutions, including university and college guides. Of course, such a directory would be impossible to compile and physically publish these days, as there are so many schools, and a satisfactory directory would have to cover both state-run and private schools, at all levels, and (in an international context) all countries. Ideally such a directory would compile all kinds of information about every school in the world, and would be readily searchable. Such a project is obviously much better suited to the web than to physical publication, and the creation of a single point of information on schools would clearly benefit students, parents and teachers. By making it possible to explore and compare schools, the subjects they teach, and their relative successes both academic and pastoral, it might even make a positive contribution to education generally. It's obvious that the commercial case for such a directory is not particularly strong, so a volunteer-based approach might be useful. We might therefore imagine the "Wiki-schools directory". Its core would be our existing schools articles (we would retain information on clearly notable schools in Wikipedia, but "locally notable" schools would move), but with suitable support it would be possible to supply the directory with mirrors of regular Wikipedia articles on the practical aspects of education. The directory would focus on applicable information, so articles on educational theories and research would not be mirrored, or would be mirrored in précis form only. It should also be possible to mirror schools-related news from Wikinews. The directory would apply the same standards of verifiability and lack of bias as Wikipedia, which we could guarantee by making a commitment that any disgreements in these areas would be adjudicated through normal Wikipedia processing, probably by the same administrators. This would give the directory the imprimatur of Wikipedia, and give confidence to its readers. The same basic look and software would of course be used. What do you think? RomanSpa (talk) 06:54, 28 June 2014 (UTC)

Unfortunately I think your suggestion would run afoul of

WP:BLP already existing articles were grandfathered. As much as I would prefer to be able to slowly get rid of the plethora of bad articles, I think that from both a practical and, to be crass, a political perspective, it is unlikely we would get any consensus in favor of tightening standards that left open the possibility of flooding AfD with all of the old articles. Again it's not ideal. But it may be the best we can hope for given the strong retentionist sentiment. And alas I see no perfect solution that doesn't involve a time machine. -Ad Orientem (talk

) 12:53, 28 June 2014 (UTC)

I think you may have slightly misunderstood my suggestion: I'm not suggesting that we create a directory within Wikipedia, and I would have no intention of trying to change

WP:NOTDIRECTORY. Current policy on primary schools has the effect of often making the page about the city in which the primary school is located into a directory of local primary schools anyway! My key point, though, is that the majority of school articles would no longer be part of Wikipedia. We would "boldly" put them all in the new project. No existing work would be lost, but it would be moved to a project explicitly dedicated to schools. RomanSpa (talk

) 15:28, 28 June 2014 (UTC)

There's a lot of good points here. For some time I've had it in the back of my mind that a new project was needed to absorb items like this. Perhaps something along the lines of WikiGazetteer? Matt Deres (talk) 14:16, 29 June 2014 (UTC)

It might well be possible to apply similar thinking to other aspects of Wikipedia. RomanSpa (talk) 16:54, 29 June 2014 (UTC)

@RomanSpa. I'm not sure there is sufficient interest in a new WMF-backed entity. The gain that would be achieved — inclusion of elementary schools, removal of the weakest high school articles from En-WP — would be offset by the loss of good high school articles and the lack of ability to integrate high school articles into biographies, which is actually one of the main rationales for the status quo at AfD. A truly comprehensive biography will include the name of a high school, but not names of elementary schools, and these links should be blue, not red. This totally dodges the issue of where one is going to find sufficient volunteers to police one of the highest vandalism topics out there... I don't see any huge problem with the current system, as I noted above it amounts to two simple rules that every New Page Patroller could learn in about 60 seconds and would never forget, and it saves AfD from a monstrous mess of never-ending notability challenges and defenses. Things could be worse than the current system, for sure. I think in a huge RFC the status quo would be sustained. I support it. Carrite (talk) 15:23, 4 July 2014 (UTC)

Lots of food for thought in the last few comments. I think the next question is where do we go from here? -Ad Orientem (talk) 17:07, 29 June 2014 (UTC)

I agree that we do need some threshold for inclusion of schools. I'm tired of the logic "most secondary schools have notable alumni, so they're notable, but now since most secondary schools are notable, all of them should be, and we need to keep every article on every school ever". Jackmcbarn (talk) 18:10, 29 June 2014 (UTC)

Time to start working on a concrete proposal? May I suggest that we begin working on something we can submit as an actual proposal. Bearing in mind that there will likely be vigorous resistance from retentionist quarters to any attempt to tighten standards, I will start the ball rolling with this...

Draft Proposal

1. Effective thirty days from the adoption of this proposal, all new articles relating to schools, including High Schools and Secondary Schools shall be subject to the notability guidelines contained in the
   GNG
   .
2. Articles about High Schools and Secondary Schools created prior to the effective date of the above amendment to notability guidelines shall be exempt, provided that on the effective date of the new guidelines the article cites at least one
   reliable source
   . Articles about schools that fail to cite any reliable sources on the effective date shall be subject to the provisions of the GNG and may be nominated for deletion via PROD and or AfD.
3. Articles about schools created after the effective date may be nominated for speedy deletion if they meet the criteria in CSD A-7.
4. With due regard for the provisions of
   Not a Directory
   , active consideration be given to the creation of a directory for educational institutions, separate and independent of Wikipedia, to which articles that do not meet GNG but which may nonetheless be of interest to some readers, may be migrated.

Note: The above is off the top of my head. Feel free to amend, comment, rant, praise, throw flowers or rotten vegetables in my direction etc... -Ad Orientem (talk) 18:47, 29 June 2014 (UTC)

@

reliable source independent of the school. Articles about schools that fail to cite any independent reliable sources shall be subject to the provisions of the GNG and may be nominated for deletion via PROD and or AfD." (so lose the stuff about effective date, and require the source to be independent). Jackmcbarn (talk

) 18:58, 29 June 2014 (UTC)

Comment: I expect that anything with a deadline will lead to the creation of a vast number of schools articles before the deadline expires, of course. As for the draft proposal itself, I'm still thinking about it. Whatever is proposed, I'd prefer that there has been substantial nemawashi in advance. Ideally, consensus should be as broad as possible. RomanSpa (talk) 12:43, 30 June 2014 (UTC)

I concur which is why I am trying to get as much input here before I move anything over to the Proposal forum. The only thing I have a really strong conviction on, is that the current approach to notability for schools is far too permissive and we need to tighten up standards. Everything beyond that is details, and I am pretty flexible there. -Ad Orientem (talk) 13:10, 30 June 2014 (UTC)

What if the deadline were put in the past, say on June 13th, the day this thread first started? Jackmcbarn (talk) 15:49, 30 June 2014 (UTC)

I suspect there will be opposition if some sort of ex-post facto protection is not included. But again I am not stuck on details. My main objective is to tighten the standards. At the risk of sounding crassly political, where we set the "effective date" is not of great importance to me. I will go with whatever date is likely to garner the most support !votes. -Ad Orientem (talk) 15:55, 30 June 2014 (UTC)

Have there been previous attempts to do anything like this? If so, how did they do? I'd be reluctant to waste people's time if something like this comes up every six months, and always meets a substantial consensus against change. RomanSpa (talk) 16:30, 30 June 2014 (UTC)

@RomanSpa: I believe the topic has come up before, but not in quite some time. As for my opinion, I suspect that the vast majority of secondary schools and universities are notable, but I don't like the idea of giving them a free pass. I personally would support this proposal in its current form as I suspect it would lead to more high quality articles on schools. I disagree with the idea of including item #2 though. I suspect that this will cause more problems than it will solve, though it might, in the end, be needed to get something like this to garner enough support. Zell Faze (talk) 18:47, 30 June 2014 (UTC)

All you really need is verifiability and accuracy of an article. If a school only has its own website, you simply wouldn't be able to write an accurate verifiable article about it.

In my view, there is no need to waste time writing notability guidelines. Gryllida (talk) 23:19, 30 June 2014 (UTC)

Notability guidelines are necessary because

Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information. -Ad Orientem (talk

) 02:12, 1 July 2014 (UTC)

In some cases, content is verifiable and accurate but too abstract (too separated from the world) to include it. Then there are no references supporting its connection with the world. When such references exist, I call such property of an article as realistic. Most often, if you can write a verifiable and accurate article, it is also realistic (connected to reality: contains a reception, criticisms, or awards section; or simply a fair amount of third-party references and information scattered throughout the article). People tend to say that it is "not notable" for:

• things they can't accurately and verifiably write about (99%)
• the minority of cases when it is accurate and verifiable but there is no relation to something from the outside (<1%)

Again, I don't think notability guidelines are necessary for either of these two cases. It is pretty simple to establish whether an article is (i) accurate/verifiable and (ii) realistic — using reading comprehension. Such guidelines may ease such routine work, but they should not be used as a rejection or deletion criteria; instead, the contributors should be told which one of the two above points is the case. --Gryllida (talk) 10:41, 1 July 2014 (UTC)

Perhaps a sensible thing to do is to think about what would be useful for our readers. Do they expect to find all their local schools in Wikipedia, or just those that are "locally notable", or only those that are "notable within a country"? And what kind of information are they seeking? Are they just checking the alumni list, or are they looking for the school's sporting rivalries, or do they want information on the school's teachers and academic performance, or what? I feel that any proposal that doesn't clearly improve the existing reader experience may struggle to gain support, which is part of why I feel there's some advantage to the idea of a separate "directory of schools" (as mentioned in point 4 above). I have the sense that editors who have a genuine interest in providing a useful resource for our readers might find this a reasonable path to take, while editors who have simply adopted the position that "all schools are notable" as a sort of fixed political and philosophical principle would presumably resist any change for purely dogmatic reasons. My question, I suppose, is: Can this change be made in such a way that it helps our readers better? If there are clear, positive advantages to a proposal, it is more likely to gain support, and if it addresses concerns about "notability" along the way, that's a nice additional benefit. A proposal that simply seeks to address the "notability for schools" question on its own, but provides nothing else, seems to me to be less likely to gain broad support.

I notice that input to this discussion has been sought at Wikipedia:WikiProject_Schools. I'd particularly like to hear what experts in this area have to say. In particular, within WikiProject_Schools would there be support for a directory-like project under the aegis of the WMF?

RomanSpa (talk) 12:28, 1 July 2014 (UTC)

Schools are currently subject to

WP:PRIMARYNEWS stories, but nobody enforces the requirement for true secondary sources at AFDs for organizations (or people—for people, especially in the case of academics, we're still trying to convince the AFD crowd that the person's own webpage on their employer's website is not an independent source). WhatamIdoing (talk

) 23:03, 2 July 2014 (UTC)

Actually, in practice at AfD GNG trumps more restrictive Special Notability Guidelines in almost every case (one exception being Unelected Politicians, who are subjected to a SNG "high bar"). As for schools, actual practice is not documented in the guidelines. I wouldn't mind an RfC that codifies what we've already been doing for years... Carrite (talk) 16:25, 3 July 2014 (UTC) Last edit: Carrite (talk) 16:27, 3 July 2014 (UTC)

• The Draft Proposal is bureaucratic rule creep and runs contrary to the well established consensus at AFD: That articles about high schools and colleges of confirmed existence are presumed notable per se and that articles about elementary schools are made into redirects to their school district or city unless exceptionally noteworthy. How much easier could things be at New Page Patrol than this? So you don't like bad schools starter articles? Skip them at NPP. Quite Easily Done. Carrite (talk) 16:21, 3 July 2014 (UTC)
  • I think "consensus" is not stagnant and that there are quite a few editors who are not happy with the flood of dubious school articles that have been given a pass. -Ad Orientem (talk) 16:28, 3 July 2014 (UTC)

The consensus is solidly established at AfD. Look at it this way: the consensus is a compromise between those in Project:Schools who might want an article about every school — including elementary schools — worldwide, and those whom, like yourself, seek a more restricted set of schools articles. You think school article content is bad now? Just open the door to every elementary school with three mentions in the local newspaper to a pass through GNG and get back to me on that! Just look at the article: if it's grades 10-12 or a college, flag it if necessary and pass it through; if it's lower grades, don't be afraid to make a bold redirect out of it. In the long run, shitty articles improve. Just because you see them in their first state doesn't mean that's the way things end up... The current system is simple for NPP volunteers, simple for AfD volunteers, and is a very rational compromise between inclusionists and deletionists... Carrite (talk) 16:38, 3 July 2014 (UTC)

It's not that consensus is solidly established. It's that there's a guideline that says to keep them, and nobody is willing to deviate from them in an AfD. Jackmcbarn (talk) 15:26, 4 July 2014 (UTC)

Apologies I have been somewhat distracted of late and this discussion fell off my radar. I am not sure how often this has been raised here or elsewhere. That needs to be looked into as suggested. As much as I disagree with the current guidelines, I don't want to waste everyone's time by revising a subject that may have been addressed in the recent past. -Ad Orientem (talk) 14:22, 16 July 2014 (UTC)

My position has long been that specific notability guidelines (Schools, PROF, etc.) should serve as effective heuristics for when a subject would likely meet the GNG after a concerted search. Where they are effective, we should keep the specific guideline. Where they aren't we should (I realize there's no consensus for this, but whatever) direct the specific notability guideline directly to the trash and rely on the GNG. In this case if your argument is that the de facto notability guideline for schools (which is to say that secondary and post secondary schools in anglophone countries are automatically notable) isn't a good proxy for the GNG, your proposal should simply be to implement the GNG. No additional bullet points are needed.

In a practical sense, we don't delete articles on schools for 3 reasons, 2 of which are widely admitted and one of which is a nasty secret (:P). First, schools do tend to be notable, in the main. Secondary and post-secondary schools are usually the subject of some articles somewhere, even if they aren't easily

found online

. We have enough articles on schools and have had enough deletion debates about schools to build strong priors about the existence of sourcing. This speaks directly to my heuristic statement above. Second, people like writing about schools. "But Protonk," you interject, "people like writing about bands and we delete them all the same! WP:OSE, BBQ, BSG, etc." While it's true that reader/editor interest doesn't speak to policy, we should all kinda be aware that readers write articles. Rejecting wholesale reader interest should be done only if we have a pretty good reason for it and shouldn't be done if we can find even one decent argument against it. Third, we have a bias toward schools, colleges and other nominally "non-profit" ventures. We don't see them as agents acting in their own interest, rather they're semi-public pieces of the civic landscape. A small high school with about as much sourcing as an equally sized silicon valley startup will not get the same negative attention because we're not on the lookout for the school's self-promotion. Your high school has bricks and teachers? Good enough for us. Your company has an office and employees? Piss off until the Times reports on it. I'm not saying we need to upend that tradition (attempting to do so would be even more fruitless than making notability sensible!), but we should be aware it exists. What I would suggest is that we start thinking about schools (especially post-secondary schools) as agents who will act in their own interest, often inflating their importance beyond what can be supported by sourcing.

All that said, I doubt this is going anywhere (no offense intended Ad Orientem), as it is fighting against years of tradition and for the most part our heuristic basically works. Protonk (talk) 14:41, 17 July 2014 (UTC

Protonk and DGG have acurately summed up what is generally acdepted for schools, so it is unlikey that any discussions in the fnear uture are going to get things changed. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 07:52, 22 July 2014 (UTC)

After some considerable thought I have reached a few conclusions. First, I remain unconvinced by the various arguments in favor of the existing guideline which I strongly disagree with. Secondly, I believe there are a not insignificant number of editors who feel similarly. Third, the numbers who want to see the guideline reformed are not sufficient to establish a consensus. In situations like this, the status quo almost always wins by default. And since I am not a fan of tilting at windmills I am disinclined to pursue this further. I will instead take the advice offered above and just decline to review or edit articles on schools. If a serious reform proposal ever makes it into an appropriate forum I would of course give it every consideration. -Ad Orientem (talk) 00:27, 29 July 2014 (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.

Cast lists

I don't know whether I need to make a proposal for this idea but I would like some feedback first before I start applying it to articles. There may be some objection that I haven't thought of, or there may be a better way to implement it. I think that cast lists for films etc. could be presented similarly to the way it's done when the credits roll up at the end of a production. It would look like this:

Character	Played by
Joseph Bloggs	Harold Axtoe
Jimmy the Spiv	Michael Tysoff
Christine Jones	Charles another actor

Any comments will be gratefully received

Jodosma (talk) 13:03, 10 August 2014 (UTC)

Do i understand you correctly that the gist of your suggestion, compared to how the cast is covered in, say, Gone with the Wind or The Third Man is a change in layout? I don't see the benefit to the encyclopedia. Huon (talk) 21:17, 10 August 2014 (UTC)

I just think it looks better and is clearer to read. Also it would provide a method to make the layout of such lists consistent throughout the encyclopedia. Jodosma (talk) 07:50, 12 August 2014 (UTC)

Sounds like something to propose and discuss at

WP:CASTLIST. DMacks (talk

) 07:54, 12 August 2014 (UTC)

I may do that. Another point I forgot to emphasise is that there is no consistency with small lists like these; there are many different ways in which they are presented and consistency is surely something to be desired. Jodosma (talk) 08:04, 12 August 2014 (UTC)

Honestly, I don't see any advantage in this. Why is this better than a normal list? Why is this better than a table without all the deprecated "align" BS? Why should cast lists follow the formatting of the credit roll? —Farix (t | c) 12:06, 12 August 2014 (UTC)

What is "normal"? I have explained, haven't I, that there is no normal (i.e. consistency) on this wiki, and that what I'm looking for is consistency, i.e., presenting similar things in the same way to the reader, not the editor. I'm getting sick and tired of people who think that Wikipedia is for it's own editors and not for the readers. Jodosma (talk) 18:25, 12 August 2014 (UTC)

Is there really a need for consistency here? So long as the information is presented in an easy to read and easy to maintain list, there shouldn't be a problem. The reader isn't going to be confused by different articles using different formats to list the cast. Consistency for the sake of consistency is no virtue. And it prevents editors from experiment with formats on how best to present that information. —Farix (t | c) 22:24, 12 August 2014 (UTC)

The list based methods tend to scale to large lists, if you had a large list with this format it would not scale well to multi-columns and could lead to excessive vertical scrolling, especially on wide monitors. — xaosflux ^Talk 00:58, 13 August 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for all the input. I'll forget about the idea for now. Incidentally I didn't realise that "align" was deprecated, seems quite useful in some situations. Jodosma (talk) 07:15, 13 August 2014 (UTC)

Infoboxes, templates instead of free-form text for hatnotes, standardized font sizes for section headings, we could go on and on. All contribute to a consistent look and feel that increases the reader's comfort level. The consistency is enforced by the software rather than depending on the editors' compliance with some guideline that they might not even be aware of. I'm not prepared to speak to the overall merit of a "cast list" template, but it seems wrong to dismiss it as "consistency for the sake of consistency". As with any template, it could be designed so as to provide support for any reasonable situation or requirement. {{Reflist}} is a comparable example.   Mandruss |talk  18:28, 13 August 2014 (UTC)

Create "hoax investigations"

I want to create "hoax investigations". I think it will reduce the length of the lifetime of Wikipedia hoaxes.--S/s/a/z-1/2 (talk) 08:19, 17 August 2014 (UTC)

We've already got

WP:NPP. If they couldn't pick up on the fakery, how are you going to? Pound random and google every article? --erachima talk

08:31, 17 August 2014 (UTC)

No. We won't do this for any article unless an editor believes that the article is a hoax. --S/s/a/z-1/2 (talk) 11:09, 17 August 2014 (UTC)

Yeah, not seeing the value here. If you want to watch AfD for articles with suspected

WP:V issues go ahead, but the lack of any proactive aspect to your plan means that it's definitionally incapable of "reducing the lifetime of Wikipedia hoaxes." --erachima talk

11:19, 17 August 2014 (UTC)

• A new board does absolutely nothing without a new set of policies and procedures. A wikiproject, on the other hand, has a chance at some success by at least bringing together hoax-hunting editors to share strategies and coördinate investigations. VanIsaac_WS^cont 18:17, 17 August 2014 (UTC)

Create a BOT to alphabetize and organize categories automatically

As someone who has been doing this manually for years, I hereby dutifully beg of anyone who is technically proficient and knows how to create and run a bot that will:

1. Automatically sort all Categories on each article and category page alphabetically;
2. Create a uniform system for where to place categories on each article and category page that commence with numbers, such as years of birth/death, centuries, and any category that starts with a number/numeral.

Please see the centralized discussion at Wikipedia:Bot requests/Archive 61#Create a BOT to alphabetize and organize categories automatically. Thank you, IZAK (talk) 09:13, 4 August 2014 (UTC)

Discussion re-opened at VPP

Please see Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)/Archive 114#Create a BOT to alphabetize and organize categories automatically. Thank you, IZAK (talk) 22:50, 5 August 2014 (UTC)

Tech help required to improve categories

Please see Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)#CatVisor and User:Paradoctor/CatVisor#Planned features if you are willing and able to assist this innovative WP project move along it would be greatly appreciated. Thank you, IZAK (talk) 23:34, 12 August 2014 (UTC)

Alternative to right to be forgotten

More essential than the right to be forgotten is the right to reply, to have your vision known. If there would be a separate space where everybody who feels the information on a page is not fair to him could have the possibility to explain his point of view, two other problems may be contained.

- Sensorship as a result of the right to be forgotten.

- People editing pages about themself.

And it could increace accuracy of the main page as authors take in to account that point of view. Controversial articles that talk about (political) issues where many people feel involved may have to be excluded.

A personnel reply could also be something like: I admid I was wrong there, but it was 10 years ago. I didn't know what I know now. Look what I did after that.

Hopefully courts would take into account the existance of that possiblilty in individual cases when somebody tries to force the right to be forgotten. And if so also the search site committee will be less inclined to approuve a request if that possibility exists. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 83.101.91.31 (talk) 09:26, 9 August 2014 (UTC)

If you're discussing anything other than the normal Talk page process, that's a horribly unencyclopedic suggestion and you may as well consider it rejected out of hand. Wikipedia is not a collector of public apologies. --erachima talk 11:03, 9 August 2014 (UTC)

You are on such a page expressing such opinions as you edit this page, and your anonymity, at least as far as your IP number, is totally preserved. Yes we have that policy already! Obviously, however, you have some deeper concerns of a legal nature which you have not explained here. ~ R.T.G 02:37, 21 August 2014 (UTC)

I have an idea that could help achieve great things for conservation & the environment - but I need someone to help me with the proposal and technical side

Hi there

I have always been interested in animal welfare and environmental safe guards but have recently become more involved especially on facebook.

I have noticed that there are so many different groups/charities set up for animal welfare and against animal cruelty and trophy hunting etc that no cohesive action is being taken as people are so fragmented. Also many of the public have lost faith in donating to charity due to bogus charities being set up to extort money and some charities having hidden agendas (like a well known animal charity being founded by and supporting trophy hunters)

Being independent and transparent I think wiki is the ideal vehicle for my idea. It's to set up a wikiplanet. To record all the environmental groups, animals groups, charities etc - what they do, if poss the percentage of money raised that goes to cause, contact details, interested journalists, relevant news articles, interested politicians, interested Lawyers, interested ecologists, interested philanthropists etc etc.

People could then ideally be able to cross reference information to properly show global trends, contact relevant groups and hopefully by sharing information get the silent majority to see the facts and hopefully stop being silent.

Getting this information out there would mean eg people fighting trophy hunting in Zimbabwe could contact all anti-trophy hunting groups, all Zimbabwe animal groups, could contact world elephant groups, world rhino groups, world big cat groups, could maybe find a interested journalist, lawyer, donor.

You already publish lists of charitable organisations and animal rights charities etc (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animal_rights_groups).

I do not suggest you promote any charities but simply produce a list and add extra information in a way that people can use it to search and cross reference.

And to be fair I would suggest you produce a complete list by providing information on all animal/ eco groups eg some Animal Conservation groups are pro-hunting. So add them to the list but answer about all groups Do you support/denounce trophy hunting?

The big picture is if this information were available and provided by an independent source like Wiki it could literally help people to change the world for the better.

Yours sincerely

Helen Timson

Much of this information is already available within individual articles. If you are proposing a wiki dedicated to this purpose (i.e., as you call it "WikiPlanet") then the correct place to make his suggestion is

talk

) 14:55, 14 August 2014 (UTC)

Hello Helen Timson, this page is for discussing rules and regulations (not for discussing individual content so the worth of response may be limited), however, if you have a specific list in mind that is noteworthy, such as a list of noteworthy anti hunting groups, please go ahead and create the page in the same style as the list of animal rights groups you referenced, or if you think that is a bit difficult, try navigating through the "Community Portal" on the left hand side of the Wikipedia page to Requested Pages/Articles and follow the instructions. (to create a page your self you will have to make an account and log in, or you'll have to request someone to do it, which I can do if you have the list to hand, just ask my talk page, but items with lesser notability will be deleted form the list at random because that's just how Wikipedia is kept in trim)

Alternatively, if what you want to do is create a website with a wiki program on it, please refer to Mediawiki, which is the home site for the software this site runs on. This software is completely free for any purpose, and though somewhat complicated, it is well documented and updated and should become intuitive for you through use. In fact, many service internet providers who host websites will offer to pre install wiki software free and it can be edited to look however and contain whatever you want. Best of luck.. ~ R.T.G 02:29, 21 August 2014 (UTC)

Locking topics without prose that are guarunteed not to change very often

If a list isn't going to change for a very long time, or some other lengthy information, like a list of international dialling codes, the full text of a constitution etc.. that information can be written into the mainspace on a blank article, and let's say the otherwise blank article is called "X", well if you put x in brackets thus {{X}} on a page called "Y", the contents of the page "X" will appear as though it had been edited into the source of page "Y", but in fact page x could be locked elsewhere requiring a request to edit, while any required accompanying text could still be edited on page "Y" normally.

I do not know what this proposal is called in concise terms so I do not know how to search for it in existing policy or proposals, but as regards this, if those people who thought the barcode had changed found that it wasn't possible to edit, they'd have gone to the talk page where they'd have received education and no edit warring on the main space would have occurred at all, so let's do thet. Yeah it's definitely good practice and if it already exists as policy please someone tell me that policy for some reference, thankyou ~ R.T.G 02:12, 21 August 2014 (UTC)

Like the list on

Inclosure_Act

. Couldn't that list be locked with the creative aspect remaining open? Shouldn't the list be locked with the rest of the writing remaining open? Actually, the method is called transcluding the text and the, variable?, is {{:page x}} for "Page x" content to be transcluded.

The sort of edit warring this guideline would avoid peaks at the most critical times, i.e. when a rumour floats up. There could be a template for the talk page informing if a page contains, or only function is to be, transcluded text. ~ R.T.G 19:37, 22 August 2014 (UTC)

Community desysop process

Why, yes, I do know how many times this has been proposed. And how many times it's failed. I'ma try anyway. User:Writ_Keeper/Community_desysop_process is where it's at. Comments/concerns/feedback welcome! (preferably on the talk page) Writ Keeper ⚇♔ 20:57, 21 August 2014 (UTC)

It is hard to read due to very long paragraphs that cover more than one idea at a time. I am reading it though.

Chillum

21:14, 21 August 2014 (UTC)

I never said I was a writer. Writ Keeper ⚇♔ 21:19, 21 August 2014 (UTC)

You want, in general, a two-step, procedural and courtesy, delay to the beginning of review. A new designated place to begin proposal. Minimal interaction between editors, insofar as, restriction of detailed questioning of each voter on the matter, yea or nay without being asked to defend your philosophical worldview. A review of the percentage of dissatisfaction required. And you want to review perennial proposals on the side, periodic retesting, the community implications of insulting an administrators value, and probably some other stuff. Plus a few related tweakings. Or, something completely different..? ~ R.T.G 23:55, 24 August 2014 (UTC)

Automatically redirect titles with a missing parenthesis

There is a problem with disambiguation pages that have parentheses in the article titles that results from several softwares not recognizing a link that ends with ")". For example, if you copy the link to the page Georgia (country) in an instant-messaging software, it will result in the link not working due to the IM program leaving the last parenthesis out. Some editors have acknowledged this, and thus a redirect exists at Georgia (country.

Apparently Firefox browser (or Windows 7) fixes this because if I copy the article title from the browser bar it results in an ASCII link: "Georgia_%28country%29". But it still a problem with direct copy&paste, atleast I remember several times clicking a link that's not working due to that.

I think it would be a bit too excessive to create redirects like "Georgia (country" for every page. Would it be possible to somehow make Wikipedia automatically redirect to the right page? I'm pretty sure there's only a handful of articles that actually need only one parenthesis, like the article "

(" itself. --Pudeo'

00:05, 29 July 2014 (UTC)

I suggested this in 2007, bugzilla:11056, but it sounds like fixing it is more complicated than we both expected. :( It might be worth discussing further, I'm not sure. (Note: There are further problems with links in IRC, where some programs will cut off the URL before the opening "(", but that's probably a separate issue.) Quiddity (talk) 19:41, 31 July 2014 (UTC)

OK, thanks for the heads up. That bugzilla report had a response: "An automatic check may sound cute, but would conflict if you actually wanted the title without the closing parenthesis." Isn't the number of pages that actually end with "(" (and thus would conflict with the automatic check) really limited though, and we could single-them out from the database? But I suppose it can be problematic indeed, then. --Pudeo' 22:26, 31 July 2014 (UTC)

Or, titles without the closing parenthesis can override the automatic redirect. Zhaofeng Li [talk... contribs...] 23:59, 31 July 2014 (UTC)

What about a routine that only kicked in if the page was not found? Then those rquesting articles with deliberately mismatched brackets would never encounter it. I have never run across this bug - I'm a Firefox user. —Anne Delong (talk) 03:39, 1 August 2014 (UTC)

Add to that any article ending in punctuation to make it complete. Agathoclea (talk) 12:42, 1 August 2014 (UTC)

Indeed. I've been experimenting with punctuation at my sandbox, and in test emails, and trying to determine the extent of the problem (number of affected articles) via some searches in Quarry. I'll followup at that bug, when I know more for sure. Quiddity (talk) 19:54, 18 August 2014 (UTC)

The English Wikipedia already has a feature which automatically adds a link at the top for unregistered users and registered users with the default language English. For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_(1988_film starts: "Did you mean: Georgia (1988 film)". I think that is sufficient. It is done by {{No article text}} which is used in MediaWiki:Noarticletext. PrimeHunter (talk) 22:17, 25 August 2014 (UTC)

This was implemented in 2009. The CSS class .searchdidyoumean was dropped from normal pages making the link less prominent. Could somebody find the responsible dev so they can fix this or go around the 200 wikis and hard code it in?
The Wiktionary projects wrote an auto-redirector Javascript to deal with case insensitivity, so we probably should integrate with that — Dispenser 21:21, 26 August 2014 (UTC)

"Read Later" Feature for the Mobile Application

I've just discoverd the Village Pump, and I believe this to be a good place to voice my idea...

I read mobile wikipedia a lot for entertainment. Since the mobile application doesn't have tabs, I can't open links to other articles without leaving the one I was reading. This can be an issue when I'm reading a large article with links to other large articles which I wish to read (or need to read to understand the content of the current article) and soon enough I'm 12 articles deep and I can't remember which one I started on.

I was wondering, would it be possible to implement the ability for a user to long-press a link, have a drop down menu open with an option to "Read Later" (And maybe even have another Save Page option for easy access, along with the option in the corner dropdown menu) which would then save the link to a list, accessible from a menu similar to the Saved Pages?

It would differ from the Save Page option by not requiring the user to be on the specific article to be saved, and not download the content itself, only the link. It would be similar to the Watch Later playlists on youtube. Smortypi (talk) 18:06, 21 August 2014 (UTC)

Hi Smortypi,

Thanks for posting this idea. I need to know how you are reading Wikipedia. Are you using your normal web browser on your mobile device, or are you using the Wikipedia mobile app? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:26, 21 August 2014 (UTC)

I'm using the Wikipedia Mobile app for Android. I hope I'm doing all of this right. If not, you have my sincerest apologies. Smortypi (talk) 00:44, 22 August 2014 (UTC)

Maybe you could add them to your watchlist in the mean time ~ R.T.G 06:25, 22 August 2014 (UTC)

Sounds like a suitable workaround for me. Thanks for the idea. Smortypi (talk) 13:27, 22 August 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for the reply,

User:DGarry (WMF)

is the product manager for the mobile app on Android. I'm sure he'll be interested in your suggestion when he sees it.

The watchlist workaround won't work for minority of users who have large watchlists for editing, but it's a clever workaround for most people. Also, I wonder whether "Read Later" could/should download the page for reading offline? (That might not be such a good idea if you have limited space on your device, but it might be nice if you're filling your list of things to read when you'll be away from your normal internet connection.) What do you think? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:16, 22 August 2014 (UTC)

The watchlist is working in a pinch but it's a bit clunky to navigate, not to mention it can't be accessed from the mobile app to the best of my knowledge. To me, it sounds like Read Later and saved pages go hand in hand. But like you said, due to storage constraints and the like for some users, it might be best to keep them two separate selections. I'm thinking that Read Later could be more of a bookmark system to complement the saved pages option rather than an extension of the latter. I'm not sure, I'm on the fence on whether it should download the pages or not. It seems like it's the kind of thing where the best solution will become apparent after implementing and testing it out. Smortypi (talk) 23:25, 22 August 2014 (UTC)

I don't use apps, so I can't say anything for sure, but can't you just switch to desktop view and then zoom in a bunch? I hate most mobile versions of sites and Wikipedia is no exception, but at least there's the viewswitching option at the bottom of every page. I don't think it'd work for the app (I'm assuming it's a separate program as opposed to just another way to view the website), but at least that's a way to access your watchlist. Supernerd11 _{Firemind ^_^ Pokedex} 01:41, 28 August 2014 (UTC)

Hello

talk

) 00:03, 23 August 2014 (UTC)

You're right, it would over-clutter things, and the more I think about it, the more I realize that the long press function to save the pages would solve my problem which is all I really need. It's not too much of a hassle to remove read saved pages. Thanks a lot for this; it's gonna make browsing even better than before (and a lot more efficient for me, too!) Smortypi (talk) 00:31, 23 August 2014 (UTC)

Question about the post

Hi to all, I want to ask you, if it is possible to accept the biography about our Rector translated from Macedonian to English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninoslav_Marina . I can not understand what is not good in this article, please if it is possible make the corrections in order to post this article without problems. Thank you in forward. Jovan UIST — Preceding unsigned comment added by Jovanuist (talk • contribs) 11:27, 27 August 2014 (UTC)

It looks like you're trying to cite the Macedonian article in the English article. Wikipedia is not a

reliable source and should not be used as a citation. On the other hand, if you're trying to incorporate translated text from the Macedonian article into the English one, I'd recommend consulting Wikipedia:Translation for guidance. --NYKevin

01:49, 28 August 2014 (UTC)

Suggestion for a WelcomeBot

Over at wikiHow (where I come from), we have a feature called WelcomeBot, which automatically welcomes new users. Would a similar feature here be convenient?

talk

) 00:21, 29 August 2014 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Perennial proposals#Use a bot to welcome new users --Gryllida (talk) 01:34, 29 August 2014 (UTC)

It's time to discuss this...

due to two recent incidents involving the editors Bulletrajabc (see this discussion) and Gnuuu (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log) (see that editor's contributions) in as many days I feel that it is time that we discuss the possibility of changing the right of an editor to move pages after 4 days and 10 edits. I feel that this is far too low, and has been seen recently, is ripe to be taken advantage of. My idea would be to make it a 30 day/500 edit restriction, OR (my preference) make it like the rollback right - "if you don't have it, you can't do it" sort of thing. I know and accept the fact that Wikipedia is an "open" wiki, but I think the time has come to put more restrictions in place for the good of the project.   ArcAngel   (talk) ) 09:25, 14 August 2014 (UTC)

I actually agree. 90% of moves require discussion. The obvious moves that can be performed boldly are usually only obvious to experienced editors. Like if an IP made made a new article for someone with a famous stage, but placed it under their real name. An experienced editor would move it due to

WP:STAGENAME, but a rookie probably wouldn't know about it. The article creator might actually move it back due to ignorance of the guidelines. I think moving is something that should be a right you apply for just like rollbacking. Feedback ^☎

21:58, 25 August 2014 (UTC)

I disagree. I've moved a few hundred pages—probably about five times as many as you—and I doubt that even a dozen really required discussion. Preventing page moves means preventing people from moving drafts into or out of the main namespace, which means preventing them from fully engaging in normal editing work.

Also, raising the requirements for autoconfirmed status was discussed a couple of months ago, and the WMF refused on grounds of principle ("anyone can edit").

Finally, people who think that en.wp is "normal" would do well to look around a bit more broadly. At many Wikipedias, you don't even need to login to create articles, and autoconfirmed status may be awarded even sooner. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:12, 26 August 2014 (UTC)

Strongly disagree. With me, it was difficult enough to get just 10 edits without all the nice tools that auto-confirmed users have access to. 500 edits would seem almost impossible to attain to, and we would lose a lot of new contributors (you would have lost me, as well). I would only support admins having the right to removed this status from users if they obviously abuse it.

talk

) 14:48, 29 August 2014 (UTC)

New York Times Bestsellers

This may be a policy issue, but I'll start here. There are about 5,000 pages that have the term New York Times Bestseller, and many are for

people

who have written books or the books themselves. Often these tout: "his New York Times bestselling book...." This is fine, except that not all NYT bestsellers are equal - far from it. There are those that are on the list for months or years (e.g. a Stephen King book), and there are those that make it into a small-ish category ("Hardback business books") at position 30 for one week. I would like to discuss the idea of requiring those boasts about being on the bestseller list to have a reference to the actual NYT page, or in the case of one that was on the list for more than one date, to have a link to the last page (which then gives the number of weeks on the list by the title). In other words, this is a fact that needs a citation.

It will take a fair amount of work to add ^{[citation needed]} to all of them, but it would at least raise consciousness about the issue if we can get it into a fair number of the articles.

What the NYT list actually means is another level of complication. Now that ebooks are included, those self-published Kindle books that sell for anywhere from $3.99 to $0.00 appear to be included, at least in some cases. Yes, a sale of $0.00 counts as a sale, AFAIK. But I don't think we can sort that out easily, so at this point I would be satisfied with requiring a citation for the claim of NYT bestseller. LaMona (talk) 19:07, 28 August 2014 (UTC)

• While
  WP:PEACOCK doesn't cover phrases like "New York Times bestselling book" because the presence of a book on that list is verifiable, I think in most cases removing that is reasonably within bounds. There's not a policy or guideline which proscribes it, so I wouldn't recommend doing so for a bunch of articles at once but it's the sort of needless puffery that would be excised a before an article reached featured status. Protonk (talk
  ) 23:42, 29 August 2014 (UTC)

I wasn't thinking of removing the statements, only adding ^[citation needed] as a reminder that saying "NYT bestseller" is a fact that needs a reference. NYT has the best seller lists online only from 2008, unfortunately, but it isn't unreasonable to ask for the reference that isn't online, right? LaMona (talk) 00:42, 30 August 2014 (UTC)

It's not unreasonable, though I would strongly recommend against running through all 5,000 pages in a go. :) If you'd like, you can make a list of the pages that have bestseller statements w/o cites on a user sub page and post a link here so other editors can pick through it and help. Protonk (talk) 02:25, 30 August 2014 (UTC)

How about just publishing the sales numbers and bestseller rank? --NaBUru38 (talk) 19:15, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

Suggestion for group that works on making things look nice.

Hi! I was just wondering if there is some group of people who are interested in helping stuff look better. I have noticed that many articles, portals, etc. have great content, but don't seem to look very good. Unfortunately, I am not very good at making things look nice. I was working on the Energy portal when I got the idea to ask. One thing that I thought would be nice was making pictures in the portals match each other. Sorry for rambling. :) SpinningSpark suggested that I post this here instead of the help, which was really kind of him. :) I'm still kind of confused on where to post things sometimes.

As I said, I'm not very good with making things look nice, which is why I was hoping there was some sort of group that works to help with this sort of thing. And I do think that photographs and drawings can look really nice together; what I meant to say was that some of the more cartoonish pictures/drawings seem to kind of clash with more realistic/detailed pictures/drawings. Of course, that's just my personal opinion. Again, thanks for taking the time to read this! :) PS: I LOVE the idea of letting people put their ideas into the idea lab so they can be worked on before being proposed!JonathanHopeThisIsUnique (talk) 16:58, 30 August 2014 (UTC)

Hello, Hopeful! I've found WikiProject Contents and WikiProject Portals. The first one seems inactive. --NaBUru38 (talk) 19:20, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

Thanks! JonathanHopeThisIsUnique (talk) 22:16, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

Watchlist: date and reason

When I add a page to my watchlist I would like to be able to put a comment which would appear next to each item on my Edit watchlist page. This would be used to remind me when and why I put it there. Often when I look at this list I find that I have forgotten the reason it's there, especially if I didn't make an edit at the time. I could put this info in my sandbox or on another subpage but this would be a much more convenient method. Jodosma (talk) 12:54, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

Moved to Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals) § Watchlist: date and reason

Misleading icons and text

Moved to Module talk:Protection banner § Misleading icons and text

 – This is not a VPI matter. --Redrose64 (talk) 10:24, 5 September 2014 (UTC)

Suggestion for polls about wikipedians.

Hi again! :) I noticed that there are lots of templates that someone can put on their userpage to tell more about themselves. I thought it might be nice to make some optional polls that people could fill out, kind of like the big issues section in debate.org, except it would show the matching templates instead of just saying yes or no. Especially since someone might not easily find all the templates that they might have put in their userpage if they did find them. :) JonathanHopeThisIsUnique (talk) 17:57, 30 August 2014 (UTC)

Do you mean polls on politics opinions? I think that's well out of the scope of the Wikimedia project. --NaBUru38 (talk) 17:29, 6 September 2014 (UTC)

User pages

As all admins will know, a large number of new users create accounts and then immediately use their user pages either to advertise their business or product, or to create an essay on a subject possibly unacceptable as an article but obviously unacceptable as a user page. Now I have no problem deleting these pages, but it does take time; over a long period quite a significant amount of time. Is there any way in which users creating a new account for the first time could be automatically directed to a simple instruction link relating to what is, and is not, appropriate for a user page? --

^"talk"

16:52, 27 August 2014 (UTC)

I suppose you could add a link to {{

its ilk, but they already contain a lot of junk people don't actually read. Maybe add a {{#ifexist}} to {{editnotice load}}? --NYKevin

01:29, 28 August 2014 (UTC)

A quick thing to do that would be somewhat effective would be to add a link to, say,

Welcoming Committee can take care of this?). Obviously, this wouldn't work for everyone, but it'd be a good first step, at least until we can implement something else. Supernerd11 _{Firemind ^_^ Pokedex}

01:33, 28 August 2014 (UTC)

I know this is the idea lab and we aren't supposed to say no, but welcome templates need fewer things on them, not more. Protonk (talk) 13:30, 30 August 2014 (UTC)

I agree. Fewer things = more of them get read. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:14, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

Why haven't we upgraded to CC 4.0 yet?

According to [3], it is expressly allowed to relicense 3.0 things under 4.0 (but not the reverse). So far as I can tell, we don't need anyone's permission to do this (though I imagine the WMF would freak out and superprotect everything if we actually flipped the switch without their permission, so please don't actually do that). Until we make such an upgrade, any CC-BY-SA-4.0 text will be impossible to incorporate, while after making such an upgrade, 3.0 text would continue to be usable. Does anyone object to such a change in principle? --NYKevin 01:20, 28 August 2014 (UTC)

What's materially different about 4.0 vs 3.0? Protonk (talk) 23:47, 29 August 2014 (UTC)

Very little, at summary level. The summary of CC BY-SA 4.0 says "Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0)", where the summary of CC BY-SA 4.0 says "Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0)". Otherwise, they are identical. But at detail level, CC BY-SA 4.0 looks like a complete rewrite, I think because CC BY-SA 3.0 failed to take into account certain legal matters outside the U.S. --Redrose64 (talk) 13:27, 30 August 2014 (UTC)

One of the more obvious changes is automatic license restoration. Suppose Alice publishes something under any CC license (not necessarily BY-SA). Bob unwittingly violates the license, perhaps by failing to properly attribute her. Some time passes, and Alice becomes aware of the violation. She informs Bob, who promptly corrects his mistake. Under all versions including 4.0, Alice may pursue copyright violations for the duration in which Bob was not in compliance (subject to a variety of legal issues not relevant to this discussion). But under 3.0 and earlier, Bob is legally obligated to stop distributing the materials entirely unless and until Alice formally restores the license (which, if Bob has half a brain, will probably need to be done in writing with one or more lawyers involved). Under 4.0, Bob's license restores itself automatically if he cures the violation within 30 days of becoming aware of it. Other changes in 4.0 are discussed at [4]. --NYKevin 16:12, 30 August 2014 (UTC)

Given our connections with CC I suspect its mostly a matter of waiting for them to tell us now would be a good time (plus a week or so for our copyright nerds to catch up).©Geni (talk) 15:34, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

...or waiting for the Foundation to tell us they wish that. --NaBUru38 (talk) 19:14, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

I recall seeing a discussion about this at Commons when 4.0 was new; I believe that there were concerns about personality rights. User:Mdennis (WMF) could probably find out what the status is within the legal team. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:13, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

Wikipedia talk:Declaration of consent for all enquiries#Change from CC-BY-SA 3.0 to 4.0 includes a note from our legal department that might help. This is in the works, with consistency across projects, but not yet ready to go. --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 11:24, 10 September 2014 (UTC)

In the logs - could there be a "search titles starting with this text" option?

I think that feature would be convenient, rather than typing a full title, which is case sensitive. We can look for several titles at a time with this. A few other wikis have this. A Great Catholic Person (talk) 18:01, 6 September 2014 (UTC)

Echo and watchlist

Special:Notifications & Special:Watchlist substantially overlap in functionality, except the former also contains extra (some non-public) events and doesn't provide with passive usage options (through manual page without without web-nagging or email-nagging), while the latter doesn't provide with options of active web notificaitons. Who would like to merge these two pages into one and introduce multiple levels of importance of the web-nagging notifications (red for mentions, orange for thanks, blue for new watchlist items, etc and configurable in your settings)? --Gryllida (talk) 02:12, 9 September 2014 (UTC)

They are very different ideas. The watchlist is for seeing the most recent edit on many pages. Notifications are for when something happens related to you, which is not necessarily the most recent edit. Merging these disparate ideas will only confuse the functionality of both I think.

Chillum

02:14, 9 September 2014 (UTC)

I think the newly-added Watchlist-like notifications of Flow are not useful for many of the more-active editors; apparently they can be disabled in Preferences, which is good, but it should be made more clear that the setting in Preferences controls just these notifications and not useful things like pings. The distinction between passive notification (watchlist) and active notification (Echo) is a useful one and certainly not something I'd want to see merged. Anomie⚔ 10:21, 9 September 2014 (UTC)

Anomie, surely you can put them into the same bin and choose what to be notified about actively and what to be notified about passively? -Gryllida (talk) 22:05, 9 September 2014 (UTC)

Chillum, Anomie: I can see a need in different terms for the two notification modes ('watchlist' mode is passive, 'notifications' mode is web nagging or email). To me, the lack of ability to set up watchlist to be active, or notifications items to be passive (I can't get them to appear on Special:Notifications without the web nagging in the corner), makes no sense. --Gryllida (talk

) 22:16, 9 September 2014 (UTC)

Distinguishing between New Pages Patrol reviews and AfC reviews

A common question I see asked at the Teahouse, Help Desk, and IRC help channel is from users who are confused about why their

New Page Patrols and AfC reviews being called 'reviews'; when a page is patrolled the user seems to receives a notification that their page has been 'reviewed'. I suggest that the NPP process be more clearly defined as "patrolled" rather than "reviewed". Sam Walton (talk

) 11:23, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

@Samwalton9: Please see the open RfC at Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)/Archive 115#Change the name of reviewers to "Pending changes reviewer". --Redrose64 (talk) 13:30, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

Though related, that's yet another place where 'review' is used, whereas my post was about the NPP review term. I guess that RfC is worth watching though as it would likely have a similar outcome to this query. Sam Walton (talk) 13:42, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

NPP reviews are referred to as 'patrolls', and inspected pages referred to as having been 'patrolled'. One of the fundamental differences between the two systems is that while submitters to AfC are fully aware that their creations are to be reviewed, many first-time users who create directly in mainspace may not even be aware that such a review process as NPP even exists (at least until their articles get tagged for deletion, COPYVIO, or wrong language). None of the other tags leave a message for the creator. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 14:00, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

Actually they're referred to as reviews. Having just tested it, a new user with default settings receives a notification and email when their page is patrolled. The notification states "[Page] was reviewed by [User]." and the email says "Subject: Your page was reviewed on Wikipedia. Content: [Page] was reviewed by [User]." I'm not surprised that new users are confused to find that their AfC article hasn't been actually reviewed, and we give them no explanation as to what the review the email is referring to actually is. Sam Walton (talk) 15:28, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

The following interface messages control the text in question:

• MediaWiki:pagetriage-notification-mark-as-reviewed2
• MediaWiki:pagetriage-notification-mark-as-reviewed-flyout
• MediaWiki:pagetriage-notification-mark-as-reviewed-email-subject2
• MediaWiki:pagetriage-notification-mark-as-reviewed-email-batch-body
• MediaWiki:pagetriage-notification-add-maintenance-tag2
• MediaWiki:pagetriage-notification-add-maintenance-tag-flyout
• MediaWiki:pagetriage-notification-add-maintenance-tag-email-subject2
• MediaWiki:pagetriage-notification-add-maintenance-tag-email-batch-body
• MediaWiki:pagetriage-notification-add-deletion-tag2
• MediaWiki:pagetriage-notification-add-deletion-tag-flyout
• MediaWiki:pagetriage-notification-add-deletion-tag-email-subject2
• MediaWiki:pagetriage-notification-add-deletion-tag-email-batch-body

Jackmcbarn (talk) 15:49, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

Clearly, there's a need to change the word reviewed to patrolled, possibly including a link to NPP. Chris Troutman (talk) 17:36, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

It's not just new users who find the terminology confusing. When I first received notification that an article of mine had been 'reviewed', my initial reaction was, "But I haven't requested a review!" Later of course I discovered that someone had merely given it a cursory glance to make sure it didn't meet the criteria for speedy deletion. So, not much of a review then. Patrolled is definitely a better term.--Ykraps (talk) 20:17, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

Thank you all for your feedback. I've now opened a thread at VP:Proposals with a summary of the above for further discussion. Sam Walton (talk) 22:42, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

The distinction is that reviewing involves leaving a review comment, while patrolling is only a yes/no process and feedback is optional. The discinction is easier for newcomers to notice if they're linked to review comments on their own talk page, such as using this tool (example). I'm not sure what to do with the "reviewed" → "patrolled" terming; left comments on the thread you linked. --Gryllida (talk) 22:18, 11 September 2014 (UTC)

@

WP:MULTI. --Redrose64 (talk

) 23:23, 11 September 2014 (UTC)

Bugtrack template

Tracked in Bugzilla
Bug 0000

Resolved fixed

I find the shading effect on the current Bugtracking template to be very unpleasant on the eyes. This is just an exploratory post to see if anyone else is interested on this, or if I should just drop it. I created a new (improved?) version of the template which can be viewed in my userspace. I'm not posting the samples here because I don't want to pollute Village Pump with fake Bugtrack notices if no one is interested. Thanx for any input. Alsee (talk) 00:46, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

Can you show a comparison on that page? VanIsaac_WS^cont 03:52, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

@Vanisaac I have a set of new and old versions at the my userspace link, or are they not displaying for you? I'll directly embed the code for one here. Alsee (talk) 10:08, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

I like!

Be bold :) Legoktm (talk

) 06:20, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

@Legoktm I'm a bit more cautious when it comes to altering a site-wide template :) But more to the point, the template page is locked. Alsee (talk) 21:38, 9 September 2014 (UTC)

I'm ok with this change (but I don't have a strong preference for either option).

Helder

01:08, 9 September 2014 (UTC)

• I Support the change: the flat grey is preferable to the gradient. Quiddity (talk) 22:38, 14 September 2014 (UTC)
• Ok to remove the gradient. Since you are at it, please consider a grey that fits with mw:Wikimedia Foundation Design/Color usage, maybe no border, maybe keeping the rounded corners. I have no strong opinion in any of these factors. Thank you for putting some love in this template!--Qgil-WMF (talk) 09:07, 15 September 2014 (UTC)
• I oppose, mainly becuase of the ad-hoc nature. Changing a widely used template because of one 'complaint', and no real desire for change per se, is not appropriate. Many projects have also adapted this style, so chaning would break consistencyacross projects. This is better discussed at the template talk page. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 15:17, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

How It's Made videos

The How It's Made show has very nice videos about various stuff.

• If the videos are available online, then they should be linked in the appropriate articles. For example Accordion#External links should contain the link to How It's Made: Accordions
• All the videos should be carefully archived, at the best resolution possible. After 95 years, they enter into the Public Domain and then they should be made available for free, on YouTube or other site like this.

I found a list of How It's Made videos here. I'm not sure if it's the same show. The quality of the videos doesn't seem to be very high. I can't link to a particular video, I can only link to the list of videos. Maybe the videos can be found on other sites too.

Anyone interested about this idea? —  Ark25  (talk) 22:03, 12 September 2014 (UTC)

It sounds nice, but those videos are someone's copyright, we can't just "take a copy to archive for 95 years from now". Now, if you could get the rights holder to release them under CC BY-SA 3.0----we could do all sorts of good with them. — xaosflux ^Talk 01:08, 13 September 2014 (UTC)

First, we should link to those videos, so the Wikipedia readers who read the Accordion article for example will get the link to the video How It's Made - Accordion. No copyright issues here, we just put external links to useful videos.

We can make a private archive of the videos, without exposing them to the public - just to make sure they are preserved, at the best quality. Just like any private collection of movies anyone can have. —  Ark25  (talk) 13:35, 13 September 2014 (UTC)

@

talk

) 21:00, 14 September 2014 (UTC)

@

Vanischenu

: Thank you very much for the link. The channel already has 216 videos but it's missing the first 101 episodes. There are many other issues though:

• Some clips contain four "how it's made" videos in one - for example this one: Ambulances - Dining Room Tables - Diatonic Accordions - Acrylic Awards.
• Some clips are not numbered - for example this one - How its Made Drill Bits
• Some episodes might be missing - it jumps from 110 to 203 then from 212 to 301 and so on. Although some of the skipped episodes might be in the list but not numbered.

I think it won't be exaggerated at all to try to sort that YouTube channel. Together, Discovery/Science Channel, YouTube (Google) and Wikipedia can do a better job for archiving the videos. It's a good thing for everyone. It's a shame to lose parts of this work, a lot of human effort and resources was invested in it. We should try to contact them and see if we can give a hand of help for making the video list better.

@

☎

21:23, 14 September 2014 (UTC)

@

WritingEnthusiast14: No, don't worry, as long as it's kept private there is no copyright problem at all. On top of that, it seems that the producers are releasing the videos to the public for free on YouTube. So they might be even happy if we would take over the archiving the videos in a public place like YouTube - it will spare them the headache of doing that work themselves. —  Ark25  (talk

) 22:46, 14 September 2014 (UTC)

I think a link would be useful. If someone wants to create an archive on their own that's great. But a private archive of videos seems like it would be of dubious value to Wikipedia. Mr.Z-man 03:21, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

Should Bureaucrats be able to remove the Bureaucrat right?

After reading up on bureaucrats here, I found out that they are allowed to give but not take away the right. Why is this so? Stewards are trusted to both give and take away the Steward right, and in a way, 'crats are "local stewards". I think we can trust our 'crats to exercise good judgement in taking away this right, and it should really be treated no differently from removing the admin right (i.e. if a 'crat steps down, is inactive, etc.). Stewards really don't need to be handling this job when local 'crats could be doing it.

☎

14:45, 12 September 2014 (UTC)

It is actually a rather unusual collection of what the 'crat rights include:

Add groups: Account creators, Administrators, Bureaucrats, Bots and Pending changes reviewers

Remove groups: IP block exemptions, Account creators, Administrators, Bots and Pending changes reviewers

If it's worth fixing should probably just be done once, the add category only needs Administrators, Bureaucrats, Bots; and mirror that to remove. There are a bunch of other rights that 'crats don't have access to add or remove currently, so they are not 'local stewards'. — xaosflux ^Talk 15:49, 12 September 2014 (UTC)

They do sort of resemble local stewards, in the sense that they take care of most local user rights changes. CheckUser, Oversight, etc. should be left to the stewards, though.

Actualy, by count, most user rights changes are made by administrators (e.g. assignments of rights such as rollback, pc reviewer). — xaosflux ^Talk 16:20, 12 September 2014 (UTC)

Stewards act in place of all other rights holders when none is available including Oversighters, CheckUsers, Bureaucrats, Abuse Filter Managers and Administrators. They also have access to a series of centralauth tools for managing unified accounts. Bureaucrats here are bureaucrats. On your other point, re. "CheckUser, Oversight, etc., should be left to Stewards", this is enforced by the Foundation and can't be changed unless you persuade the Foundation otherwise.

talk

) 16:38, 12 September 2014 (UTC)

I think the rationale is that the potential problems are not symmetric. If some 'crat goes rogue, and appoints some admins and 'crats out of process, a but of a pain, but not a big deal. On the other hand if a 'crat goes rogue and decide to desysop all admins, then decrat all crats, it would be a bigger mess.

I suppose the same argument could be made for stewards, so one could argue they should not have the right to remove the steward bit.

I have a suggested solution that would solve the problem, I think. It would allow the 'crat's to remove the bit without bothering stewards, and could be used for stewards as well: add a throttle on removal. For example, place a throttle that no 'crat can remove the 'crat bit more than once a day. It is hard to imagine a reasonable situation where more than that is needed in a legitimate situation, so the throttle would make sure any rogue 'crat cannot take out all crats at once.

The same could be applied for deadmining. I'd make the throttle more than one a day, to deal with the monthly deadmining process, but if the throttle were ten a day, no rogue 'crat could do too much damage at once.

Then apply the one a day throttle to stewards, and that would make sure that a rogue steward can only do so much damage at one shot.--S Philbrick(Talk) 17:27, 12 September 2014 (UTC)

Except that the rogue crat could promote multiple socks to crat, and then remove other crats, bypassing the throttle. But going back to the original topic, what problem are you actually trying to fix? Do we have an over-abundance of crats that need de-cratting that is overwhelming the stewards? Legoktm (talk) 18:47, 12 September 2014 (UTC)

I'm not trying to fix any particular problem. I just think crats should be able to administer their own local wiki, instead of always having to go to global stewards (unless the right that they need to give/remove is very restricted).

Concerning the throttle idea, I think it's a great idea. I've always been unsettled by the fact that stewards have the technical power to coup the entire project (even though I'm sure that would actually never happen). I think, though, that there should be at least a few volunteer users who have the ability to alter user rights with no restriction, in case of an emergency. Maybe there could be two types of stewards: newer ones who are restricted by the throttle and more experienced ones who are not restricted.

☎

19:15, 12 September 2014 (UTC)

Fair point, Legoktm. Easily addressed by delaying the ability of a new 'crat to decrat for 24 hours. (as distinct from a longtime 'crat who temporarily was decratted, then restored). I am less concerned about the inability of a crat to remove another crat without getting a steward involved, as I am that a stewards has such power. While I have a lot of respect for the stewards I know, it only takes one to create a mess.--S Philbrick(Talk) 19:32, 12 September 2014 (UTC)

It's even worse than that because you are thinking about en.wiki only. A compromised Steward account could remove every functionary on every project (all 800+ of them). But if you deal with this supposed risk then what about the accounts with the Staff or Sysadmin bit? They can do the same... and then there are all the people with shell access who could delete the databases. Ultimately I'm afraid you have to trust someone to have access and no amount of fiddling around with user access rights and levels will make the problem go away completely. In fact you could make it worse by limiting everyone to the point that nobody can fix the problem. For example, there was an occasion where the Stewards had to de-sysop (and had there been any de-crat) everyone on a project that had gone rogue. With a throttle that would have needed 10 Stewards to be around to do it simultaneously, and there's very little chance of that happening, so a throttle would have increased the damage to the project rather than reducing it.

talk

) 14:41, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

That's what I was thinking. You have to trust someone to have those abilities. There will be issues with every suggestion, but you have to settle on something.

Overall, I feel pretty sure we can trust our crats and stewards, especially considering all the community scrutiny they have to go through to obtain the right. To be honest, I'm not a huge fan of long, complicated hierarchies, and I think a system like "non-restricted and restricted crats/stewards" would just be too complicated.

☎

15:18, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

As much scrutiny as our 'crats get, the stewards get much more. And their ability to corrupt the whole project (not just Wikipedia) is so high that if one of them goes rougue, our 'crats are the least of the problems. On the other hand, if you give the 'crats the ability to de-'crat other accounts, the damage could be irreparable by our community, and we would need steward intervention anyway. And just for the record, we have 57 former admins who were desysoped for cause (this excludes admins who resigned while an ArbCom case about them was open); we have 3 'crats who lost their 'crat status due to problematic behavior (Ed Poor, Essjay, Nichalp). עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 13:35, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

We would need steward intervention even with the current system. If a few crats went rouge, the stewards would have to de-crat them, since the local crats couldn't do it.

☎

14:52, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

Compare revisions

I find it sometimes difficult to spot the difference between two revisions, especially when the difference is small, like a dot, a digit or a space, or when the two compared text blocks are large. It would be nice to change the colours of the two revisions, it is now light yellow and light blue, to something more contrasting. Could this be an option in the personal preferences, please? Jan Arkesteijn (talk) 10:29, 20 September 2014 (UTC)

@

WP:VPI. Anyway, there are various things that you can do, for instance, have you tried going to Preferences → Gadgets and enabling "Display diffs with the old yellow-and-green colors and design"? --Redrose64 (talk

) 13:24, 20 September 2014 (UTC)

It's better, but there are still changes that are hard to spot. Jan Arkesteijn (talk) 15:07, 20 September 2014 (UTC)

OK, if you stay with "Display diffs with the old yellow-and-green colors and design", we can adjust the styling in that. You have probably noticed that when that gadget is enabled, the changed text shows up in red instead of black. This doesn't reveal the positions of extra or removed spaces though, so some time ago I worked out two CSS rules:

td.diff-deletedline .diffchange {
  background-color: #cfc;
}
td.diff-addedline .diffchange {
  background-color: #ffa;
}

If you add that to Special:MyPage/common.css and save, you'll find that where the red text is, the yellow and green background colours are exchanged. It's then easier to spot an added space on the right as a yellow patch in the green - and a removed space on the left as a green patch in the yellow. --Redrose64 (talk) 16:04, 20 September 2014 (UTC)

Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to work. I suppose I am doing something wrong? I ctrl-refreshed the page. Jan Arkesteijn (talk) 16:53, 20 September 2014 (UTC)

Do you have "Display diffs with the old yellow-and-green colors and design" enabled? I should also have asked which skin you are using - it's set at Preferences → Appearance. --Redrose64 (talk) 20:04, 20 September 2014 (UTC)

Yes, I have that option marked. I am using the default skin Vector. --Jan Arkesteijn (talk) 20:55, 20 September 2014 (UTC)

OK, I logged in as Redrose64a (talk · contribs), reset all prefs back to default, and enabled "Display diffs with the old yellow-and-green colors and design". On a diff like this (it's the most recent edit to Today's Featured Article), one paragraph has changed, and that paragraph has a yellow background on the left, green on the right. The actual change is hardly noticeable - it's between the words "money" and "slowed" where a full stop has been changed to a space. That full stop is boldface red: money.slowed, but there is nothing special about the space: money slowed.

Then I copied the whole of User:Jan Arkesteijn/common.css to User:Redrose64a/common.css, saved it, and viewed that diff again. Most of it looks the same, except that the full stop removed from the left now has a green background: money.slowed, and the space added on the right has a yellow background: money slowed.

This works in both MonoBook and Vector, and using both Firefox and Opera. --Redrose64 (talk) 22:56, 20 September 2014 (UTC)

I really appreciate the effort you are making. It doesn't work. I use Internet Explorer. In the old situation it displays money(red dot)slowed on a yellow background, and in the new situation it displays money slowed on a green background. No flipping of colours. But since you mentioned two other browsers I tried Chrome, and voilà, it works. However, I like Internet Explorer, so maybe it is a good idea to integrate this functionality in the preferences after all. Jan Arkesteijn (talk) 23:37, 20 September 2014 (UTC)

@Jan Arkesteijn: I have now tried it in IE8. The intended effect of exchanged background colours was there, briefly: it then switched back to the normal arrangement. I suspect that in IE, the order of precedence for CSS selectors is not the same as in other browsers. I can't say exactly why this should be so: I really do not like the "Developer Tools" interface in IE 8. But I've found that by making this change (in CSS terms, I've given the selectors a higher specificity), it now works as intended in Internet Explorer 8, and still works in Firefox and Opera. I can't say what might happen for other versions of IE. --Redrose64 (talk) 08:35, 21 September 2014 (UTC)

Thanks Redrose64, it works! --Jan Arkesteijn (talk) 09:15, 21 September 2014 (UTC)

Try enabling wikEdDiff in Preferences->Gadgets->Editing. It gives you a little triangle above the normal diff, and pressing that gives you a view which I find much preferable for seeing minor differences.-gadfium 23:58, 20 September 2014 (UTC)

Thanks Gadfium for the suggestion. wikEdDiff does not do anything for me, however. I suppose it has to do with the Internet Explorer behaviour. In the end the help of Redrose64 was successful, so now it is easier to spot minor differences in edits. Altogether it demonstrates how problematic a small change like this can be, and it is to be expected that in the future others will come up with the same question. So, maybe it is better to prevent all this and to create an option in the preferences to enable it. --Jan Arkesteijn (talk) 09:15, 21 September 2014 (UTC)

Easy copy and edit

In order to make it easier to use wikipedia for study and research could there be an additional option to view Wikipedia pages without the citation numbers? 61.3.190.28 (talk) 15:35, 20 September 2014 (UTC)Content

Text to speech readers read the numbers as well.61.3.190.28 (talk) 15:36, 20 September 2014 (UTC)Content

@61.3.190.28: Do you use a screen reader? If so, you may find Wikipedia:WikiProject Accessibility, and its discussion page useful. --Redrose64 (talk) 16:34, 20 September 2014 (UTC)

:::Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to work. I suppose I am doing something wrong? I ctrl-refreshed the page. Jan Arkesteijn (talk) 16:53, 20 September 2014 (UTC)

I left a note at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Accessibility#Superscripted reference marks. --Redrose64 (talk) 18:08, 20 September 2014 (UTC)

• Using MS word (suitable for copy pasting, but not for screen reader users): Copy paste the content to MS Word. Open find and replace (ctrl+H). Type \[([1-9]*)\] as the text to be searched for. Click "More >>". Under the search options, select (check) "Use wildcards" option. Click Replace All. All the reference brackets will be removed. (attribution to [6] and [7] which gave the trick.) (Or for wikipedia editors, to replace from wikimarkup, use \<ref*\</ref\> and \<ref name=*/\>)···
  talk
  ) 06:28, 21 September 2014 (UTC)
  • I've written a script to hide the reference numbers. Log in, open your common.js page, and paste in {{subst:iusc|User:Zhaofeng Li/RefToggle.js}}. Refresh the article, and a link captioned "Toggle references" will appear in the Tools sidebar. Zhaofeng Li [talk... contribs...] 07:23, 21 September 2014 (UTC)

    Works perfectly! Great tool.···

    talk

    ) 10:15, 21 September 2014 (UTC)

I added the script to Help:Reference display customization. --  Gadget850 ^talk 10:51, 21 September 2014 (UTC)

Thank you all so! I wouldn't have found out if I hadn't asked. 117.216.28.46 (talk) 16:00, 21 September 2014 (UTC)Content

Modular editing

This plaintext method of editing--that is, treating each article as a solid plaintext file that can be modified anywhere in the article by anybody--ain't exactly working. Through our encouragement of global editing, we also encourage global vandalism, which is a real time-suck for volunteers who could otherwise be improving articles instead of simply fighting the destruction of them.

If there were a way to lock specific sections, for instance, the episode list here, so that once the data was accurately represented and adequately sourced, the community could opt to lock it, (trusted users could receive special permissions to edit these) I think we could reduce vandalism significantly and better use volunteer time. If there is no real way to do that through the magic of technology, then I think another approach would be to start thinking about these data tables from a modular perspective, and maybe create the table as a unique "article", lock that article, and transclude the table wherever it has to go. This would ostensibly prevent vandals from tweaking the data, and would make life easier. What would we need for that? A new "table space"? I think new permissions would have to be devised so that trusted non-admin editors could change the data. Cyphoidbomb (talk) 16:41, 22 September 2014 (UTC)

• Sounds like a phenomenally bad idea. Lists can always be improved; perhaps a new format can be tried, perhaps some new data source is found which alters how we want to write it. We do NOT want editors who have good reason to improve an article to have to come to the admins with their hat in hand begging permission to improve the article or list or table or whatever. They should just be able to fix it. Despite claims to the contrary, vandals are not as much of a resource sink as people make them out to be; between the bots and edit filters and live humans, we do a damn fine job keeping them at bay. What would be a HUGE resource sink (and would drive away more good users than it would stop vandals) would be to require good-faith users to ask permission to make Wikipedia better. See Wikipedia:Perennial_proposals#Protect_featured_articles where you can see that similar proposals have been made many times in the past, and repeatedly declined. --Jayron32 19:13, 22 September 2014 (UTC)

Though I am confused by the instant negativity, I didn't suggest that admins would have to fix the modules. The crux of the idea is that something like a table of Star Trek TOS titles and airdates isn't likely to change, except when vandals change it. So why not lock such tables in a separate module so that it can't be tampered with? Any auto-confirmed user could apply for "module permissions" and make the change without bothering admins. And though you clearly think that the anti-vandal stuff is already being handled just fine, I find that the majority of my time here is spent reverting subtle vandalism for which there is no fast and easy remedy. Bots don't know if the data is wrong. Tags don't tell you if the data is wrong. Regular editors have to waste their time double-checking these facts, often on a daily basis. For what? The system's weak. Cyphoidbomb (talk) 19:41, 22 September 2014 (UTC)

I'm instantly negative against any proposal that reduces the ability of everyone to edit something. Wikipedia only has worked because it is open. As soon as you starting closing off parts of Wikipedia, you destroy what makes Wikipedia work every day. --Jayron32 23:49, 22 September 2014 (UTC)

The mechanism already exists, and is in use on articles like

semi-protection

was introduced specifically for use on templates, hence its name.

I don't think that "modular" or "module" is a good term, since the latter already has an established meaning, see

Help:Module. --Redrose64 (talk

) 23:29, 22 September 2014 (UTC)

As it happens,

WP:TFA right now; and although the article itself has no edit protection, its infobox, Template:Infobox fluorine, is semi-protected. --Redrose64 (talk

) 09:10, 23 September 2014 (UTC)

That seems to have been done against policy.

WP:PROT makes it clear that that "Administrators may apply indefinite semi-protection to pages that are subject to heavy and persistent vandalism or violations of content policy (such as biographies of living persons, neutral point of view)." This template does not seem to qualify, as the initial protection was applied in 2008 (!), 6 years ago, and while it received some vandalism, there's no reason to suspect the vandals would be waiting years for the opportunity to start vandalizing. It is hardly the sort of template that attracts a lot of attention from vandals, and after 6 years, it's probably time to unprotect it. I can think of no good reason why someone should have to register to make a good faith contribution to that template. Also, contrary to the rationale listed, the template has been edited a LOT during the intervening 6 years, meaning that people had MANY good reasons to have it unprotected. It's a shame really. The template probably needed a temporary protection to stop some vandalism at the time, but I can't see where indefinite semi-protection was supported by policy in that case. Indefinite protections should not be used because the protecting admin thinks that "nothing more useful can be added". That's not his editorial decision to make. And evidenced by the large number of edits by registered accounts, certainly there was a lot of good things to be added. It's a shame we shut unregistered users out of that process. --Jayron32

09:56, 23 September 2014 (UTC)