Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Archive 7

Is it interesting to create those articles? Examples of information that can be there: earthquakes, STS missions, astronomical predictions (eclipses), exact hour of

I don't think it'd be a good idea since a) Many things happen over longer or less definite periods of time and b) it would accumulate cruft. As is I personally find the date articles borderline. Nihiltres^{t.l} 17:17, 23 November 2007 (UTC)

I completely agree with Nihiltres. It would be time-cruft^?, and the date articles are barely worth keeping. - Rjd0060 (talk) 17:57, 23 November 2007 (UTC)

Cruft is a bad word. Please don't use it and make your case with a clear, solid explanation that doesn't rely on a catch-all term. - Mgm|^(talk) 18:29, 25 November 2007 (UTC)

Yea bad idea This is a Secret ^account 21:08, 23 November 2007 (UTC)

• There is a good reason to keep articles on dates. Dates are a common query people use to search for information. Like "What happened on my birthday on May 16, 1981". I highly doubt a similar case can be made for times. Besides, it would open a whole can of worms too. How would you count time on a ship disaster in international waters. What time would apply? Too much bother for too little gain. - Mgm|^(talk) 18:29, 25 November 2007 (UTC)

  Oppose. I agree with MacGyverMagic. An article on a specific time would collect together information that has nothing to do with each other. Also, the same earthquake might accidentally be listed under more than one time as different agencies (or the same agency at different times) come up with slightly different locations and origin times. --Coppertwig (talk) 01:33, 28 November 2007 (UTC)

  Oppose. While there is at least some correspondence between

  5 November the next, there's next to no correspondence between 4:15 PM one day and 4:15 PM on a day three months later. We celebrate the anniversaries of events, but we don't celebrate the times that they occurred (with a few exceptions). As such, I don't see any reason creating these thousand (1440, to be exact) articles is necessary or helpful. Zetawoof_(ζ

  ) 08:43, 28 November 2007 (UTC)

Seems about the definition of

spade instead. Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me}

08:46, 28 November 2007 (UTC)

What do you think? Would this be something that could be implemented without great difficulty? I'd prefer an approach like this as the old method of implementing notes is unwieldy and a nuisance to maintain. Thanks. — RJH (talk) 19:00, 26 November 2007 (UTC)

Such things are often discussed at WT:FOOT. (SEWilco (talk) 19:08, 26 November 2007 (UTC))

bugzilla:11899 is related to this.—Random832 14:52, 28 November 2007 (UTC)

Thank you. Yes I was pondering what alternative notation to use. Many old-style notes use letters rather than numbers. It would be good to allow an option similar to the CSS list-style-type for an ordered list, but I'm not sure how you would implement that. — RJH (talk) 21:14, 28 November 2007 (UTC)

Because it was ambiguous and was being misinterpretted by some editors citing it,

The new shortcut is

The old shortcut (

I hereby request consensus to search/replace "[[WP:ASR]]" with the new shortcut to accelerate awareness of the guideline's new name, to prevent "ASR" from being misinterpretted as "avoid all self-references" which is a common mistake in AfDs, etc.

The Transhumanist 23:58, 26 November 2007 (UTC)

• Support - as proposer. The Transhumanist (talk) 00:51, 27 November 2007 (UTC)

• The shortcut will be almost exclusively used in comments people have made on talk pages or project pages, and replacing the shortcut will be altering their comments. It's also a pure waste of server resources to be making automated edits to replace a redirect. We have redirects for a reason. --
  talk
  ) 02:14, 27 November 2007 (UTC)
  • The server costs need to be weighed against the human benefits. How many mistaken AfDs will be prevented by replacing the erroneous acronym? How many conflicts averted? How many contentious discussions resolved before they are started? If it was just a plain ole shortcut, I wouldn't have asked. The Transhumanist 04:41, 27 November 2007 (UTC)
    • Leave it as-is. If someone used
      WP:ASR, then they were referring, rightly or wrongly, to the policy under its own name. By changing it, you're potentially changing the meaning of what they wrote. --Carnildo (talk
      ) 08:31, 27 November 2007 (UTC)
      • Don't fix redirects that aren't broken - it's a waste of server resources. There is no point in the proposal - editors who have not heard of the self-references guideline, who find the shortcut WP:ASR, are unlikely to get the wrong impression from it. If the shortcut WP:ASR is changed to something else, like what happened when WP:EA was changed from Esperanza to editor assistance, then such a change could be considered. Graham87 09:21, 27 November 2007 (UTC)
• Oppose There are over 1000 links, most probably in old AFDs and talk archives, and I would wager many people still don't know about the name change. Unless there is something else that ASR is going to be redirected to, I don't see the point. Mr.Z-man 15:04, 27 November 2007 (UTC)

• Pointless. All of the usages are likely in either edit summaries (which cannot be altered) or comments (which should not), and, for that matter, changing _past_ uses will have no effect one way or the other on _future_ misuse. —Random832 14:47, 28 November 2007 (UTC)
  • The one thing that could have an effect (but likely isn't going to happen) would be to delete the redirect - then people might look into the issue further when they see the shortcut they linked is a redlink. —Random832 15:14, 28 November 2007 (UTC)

helpme

i wish to submit rules for a card game i made up for standard playing cards. should i copyright the narritive first? i'm really only looking to get credit for originally devising it. if posting it here will copy write it for me then that would be fine i suppose. i read the copyright literature for such things but my head is still spinning. (helpme) -- Justsomewikiguy

From what it sounds, it probably doesn't follow

notability guidelines. You might want to check that link before making your article so you don't fall prey to any sticky deletion situations. bibliomaniac15

00:24, 27 November 2007 (UTC)

Unfortunately, your card game must achieve some fame first before it can be covered in Wikipedia. Sell 5,000 units, or get it displayed or mentioned on several thousand websites (not forums), and it will be notable enough for representation here. An article about it in Time Magazine would also suffice.  :-) The Transhumanist (talk) 00:48, 27 November 2007 (UTC)

yes i suppose that is a wise policy. the game it's self is based on the blood bath struggle surrounding the diamond trade. so in that it could maybe be somewhat notable? i wrote it while i was in jail for the 5 months preceding my trial for 2nd degree murder. they reduced the charge after police admitted to having every indication that i had no intent to kill. they reduced the charge to first degree reckless homicide(a charge that does not have the burden of showing intent to kill) and still lost to my self defense plea. the trial received plenty of coverage as a case involving the passing of a human being should. perhaps i could merge the game with an article about the incident or of myself during that tumultuous time? i think the vast loss of human life surrounding this game might be considered in some way as notable. but i guess i could try to get it published in a magazine or two. let me know. justsomewikiguy ( talk) 12:00pm, 27 nov 2007 (CT)

If you get some

articles about a topic that are written by someone very close to the topic. -- John Broughton (♫♫)

23:12, 27 November 2007 (UTC)

thx justsomewikiguy ( talk) 08:37(ct) 11/24/07 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.175.200.137 (talk) 14:38, 28 November 2007 (UTC)

As I mentioned previously, we do practically nothing to let newbies know what should go into an article. So it is no surprise that they create so many useless articles. I just looked at 100 New pages - 62 of them had no references. That's probably typical. An article without references is usually not notable and not verifiable. Such articles are often speedily deleted.

The normal route to creating an article is through the search box. When the article is not found, users are immediately invited to "create this page". There is nothing in the way of advice as to what should go into a new article. What I recommend is to modify MediaWiki:Noexactmatch as follows:

The important changes are to tell people to read

Something similar that has been playing through my mind, is to make something like the

WP:AFC

template:

<!--put the text of your article here-->

==References==

{{refbegin}}

<!--List the sources from which your article is referenced here (without them, the article might be deleted!)-->

{{refend}}

and possibly:<!-- remove the below tag after your references are added -->

{{unreferenced}}

Martijn Hoekstra (talk) 18:51, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

There's that "Help" link on the left side of the page as a starting point. (SEWilco (talk) 19:08, 20 November 2007 (UTC))

There were various suggestions and a Wizard created in a recent discussion about anon page creation. Don't remember where it was. (SEWilco (talk) 19:09, 20 November 2007 (UTC))

I like Sbowers3's idea, though I don't like specifying that you need to add references after creating the page. Let me

be bold and see if this is acceptable. [1]--AnonEMouse ^(squeak)

19:24, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

Wow! That was quick. Now that it is in place, we'll see what the reaction is. One thing: possibly the new wording should be used only in the Mainspace not in other spaces. Sbowers3 (talk) 20:05, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

BTW, the reason I left out the "request it" is because WP:RA is so hard to figure out and has a gigantic backlog. Sbowers3 (talk) 20:27, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

The discussion was in this VP recently.[2] with further discussion at

Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Anon page creation. One of the proposals was for guided article creation and a test wizard was developed (Wikipedia:Article wizard). SEWilco (talk

) 19:30, 20 November 2007 (UTC))

I think you might as well go ahead and make it impossible to save the page unless there is a references section with at least one citation. The days of creating a stub for an article that somebody really ought to write are pretty much over in practice. I've been watching the speedy deletions pages and articles without references are tagged within minutes of creation, and deleted soon after. Newcomers who just want to try their hand at an article would have a better experience if they can't save the page without a citation, then they do if they start a page stub and immediately feel challenged and harassed by an administrator who has to delete 200 pages a minute just to keep up with the spam, so the administrator doesn't have the time to google the topic, or wait for the creator to get around to finishing the article. - Michael J Swassing (talk) 19:44, 25 November 2007 (UTC)

I was just thinking that it might be useful to have a ==References=== {{Reflist}} section attached by default to all newly created article pages. It's a small world! Though I would hesitate in making article creation too frustrating for anons and new users. Bear in mind that the bulk of Wikipedia is written by new users (see AaronSw's article) who might just give up if having to do too many difficult things. It's up to us, the more experienced Wikipedians, to shape the raw material and make it acceptable to the Wiki community. Too much instruction and people may give up and go away. A quick google may not turn up top quality sources, but it will generally throw up enough to show if the article if verifiable or not - and takes on average the same amount of time as it does to prepare an article for AfD. I think some people might be sending articles to AfD on principle without doing a quick search for sources because an anon had the nerve to create an article without references. That is not doing the project any favours. Where am I going with this thought? I don't know. It's late, and I should go to bed..... SilkTork *SilkyTalk 01:23, 1 December 2007 (UTC)

Yesterday, for a short period of time, one of the "Did you know" entries mentioned a U.S. political candidate [3]. This entry was soon removed because it seemed inappropriate, and I think that was reasonable. It seems to me there should be a record of a discussion on the wiki about this sort of thing, since it will probably come up again before November 2008, when the US presidential election occurs. — Carl (

It seems fine to me, although it did look somewhat like there was a little bit of favoritism. It doesn't seem to be much of a problem in my opinion. Captain panda 02:08, 28 November 2007 (UTC)

I was under the impression that

. However if editors want to break this rule, I don't care. I'd just like the courtesy of letting the editors who edit these type of articles know that they cannot put their hooks on the suggestions for the DYK. Because of this I developed this template:

Attention Editors DYK hooks about election articles, "high current interest articles" and/or USA centric articles are prohibited and will be immediately removed

However editors have reverted it twice and feel that I am being disruptive.--

TX

02:50, 28 November 2007 (UTC)

It seems to me that neutrality is a core principle of Wikipedia. I know that these articles are neutral, but putting them on the main page of Wikipedia, where tens of millions of people will see them, provide certain candidates with additional publicity. I can certainly imagine other candidates demanding the same kind of publicity. As such, while the articles are neutral, I do not think that they should appear on the main page, at least during the primary campaign. Danny (talk) 02:05, 28 November 2007 (UTC)

So do you agree with my template?--

TX

03:08, 28 November 2007 (UTC)

Well, from a technical standpoint, the template looks terrible on Firefox, with the U.S. flag overlapping the text. The U.S. flag also seems to imply that only U.S. politics are forbidden.

Aside from that, anything we put on the main page will attract additional publicity. If

WP:NPOV. —Remember the dot ^(talk

) 04:32, 28 November 2007 (UTC)

Agreed. NPOV means "treat no differently one way or the other". If someone makes a good DYK or FA or ABCXYZ during the campaign, consider it like one would consider anything else. (If the article is truly NPOV, it shouldn't be either encouraging or discouraging someone from voting for the person anyway!) Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 09:28, 28 November 2007 (UTC)

Shouldn't the foundation be asked about this? Featuring something about a candidate on the front page may have implications for campaign funding rules / equal time requirements / etc (I'm not a lawyer, so I don't know if any of this applies, that's why I said we should ask someone from the foundation).—Random832 14:50, 28 November 2007 (UTC)

As I have said elsewhere, I think we need to be mindful of avoiding it looking like Wikipedia is endorsing any political candidates. A massive public row about what candidates are receiving the most prominent coverage on Wikipedia is not in our interests. There are plenty of DYK hooks to be chosen - updaters should simply use their best judgment about what may be problematic main page content. I agree that there is some unfairness to the writers of such articles, but I think it is unavoidable. Wikipedia insiders will realise that DYK appearances are not politically motivated but it isn't going to look like that to outside interests. The article remains uncensored, the main page just needs to be updated with some discretion. WjBscribe 15:31, 28 November 2007 (UTC)

As always, let the Foundation handle legal issues, since the vast majority of us here are not lawyers, and even those who are are not the Foundation's lawyers. If they say it's legally disallowed or could cause legal problems, that's another story and we must heed that advice, but if they do not notify us of such an issue, we should neither include nor exclude DYKs solely on the basis of their subject. Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 19:06, 28 November 2007 (UTC)

Most of the reasons given here against displaying such articles on the main page are completely ludicrous: if other candidates come asking for main page coverage, the answer is quite clearly: no, we do not advertise; as far as I'm aware Wikipedia is not legaly obliged to give all candidates equal coverage, if it is, then this an issue the Wikimedia Foundation should be dealing with; if in fact a certain candidate gains additional exposure by being mentioned on the main page, then this exposure is as much negative as positive, assuming the article is balanced, which in this case it was. Wikipedia also has information on the main page about Nawaz Sharif, who is running for office in Pakistan, should we remove this also? We have coverage of the riots in France, should we remove it to avoid encouraging kids to take part in those? It's consensus that Wikipedia should have coverage on current events, so it would be ridiculous to stop informing about elections in the US because of a notion that this might actually influence these elections.--Carabinieri (talk) 20:46, 28 November 2007 (UTC)

This is probably more complicated a discussion than it needs to be. Although we fight bias, having a particular political candidate on the main page, even if it is the only featured article of any candidate, presents the appearance of bias even where the decision was impartial, or indeed may introduce a form of bias in that one is featured and another is not (but that's up for debate). We cannot, in terms of public relations, afford that with Wikipedia's visibility, even if it is an arbitrary choice in keeping with our principles. This is a matter for discretion regardless of the ideal of treating all issues important enough for the main page equally. Nihiltres^{t.l} 16:18, 29 November 2007 (UTC)

USA centric articles will be deleted? How is that possibly collegial? Your warning is offensive. Corvus cornix_talk 19:56, 30 November 2007 (UTC)

I think searching wikipedia is quite hard if you're looking for something that is quite difficult to spell because it doesn't have a "Did you mean . . ." feature, and i think it should, any thoughts. -- Hadseys (talk • contribs) 15:34, 28 November 2007 (UTC)

I agree that searching Wikipedia is rather difficult. Between the minor spelling errors, and capitalization of some letters, its easier to use an advanced Google search. - Rjd0060 (talk) 17:34, 28 November 2007 (UTC)

Whenever I look for something and misspell it, I'll create a redirect once I find the correct spelling. That will help anyone else whose makes the same mistake. EVula // talk // ☯ // 18:52, 29 November 2007 (UTC)

Same here-- Penubag  02:10, 30 November 2007 (UTC)

How do you create a redirect?

See Help:Redirect -- Boracay Bill 01:14, 1 December 2007 (UTC)

When you end up on the Wikipedia search page, to the right of the search term is a pulldown menu which lets you choose other search tools. The second option on the list is Google, which does use spelling correction. (SEWilco (talk) 19:14, 29 November 2007 (UTC))

As with newspapers, I find it irritating that photos are printed with so much information, but often neglect the date.

Please require photos to be dated it adds a dimension of information and helps historical context.

Can date either with specific actual date,

or

with approximate date, i.e. "ca. 1946".

Date should appear when cursor hovers over photo or illustration, so reader need not activate hyperlink to get more info on picture.

Thanks for your consideration. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Bobber100 (talk • contribs) 22:43, 28 November 2007 (UTC)

Clicking on a photo will show the image description page. If the uploader specified a date it will be displayed there. (SEWilco (talk) 19:12, 29 November 2007 (UTC))

I think Bobber100 meant for it to be mandatory if the photo has historical significance. We can't really do that Bobber, as I doubt all that many uploaders are aware of when the photo was taken, but putting more significance on it on the upload page might not be all that much of a bad idea. Ferdia O'Brien (Talk) 03:47, 1 December 2007 (UTC)

Such a wiki project could list the meaning of popular and obscure phrases. "Walking on eggshells", "Kill the keg", "Cream of the crop", "Raining cats and dogs", "Wild goose chase", "Feet of clay", "Put a sock in it", "Out to lunch", "Hold your horses", "What's Up?", "Dropped the ball", "Quit cold turkey", "Right up your alley".

Searching for a group of words results in a close match, or you could search "for all words", "some of the words" or "exact phrase". So...call it a "Phrasipedia" or an "Expressionary"?

-boozerker 05:14, 29 November 2007 (UTC)

• • I think Google can do a good enough job for me-- Penubag  06:20, 29 November 2007 (UTC)

Wiktionary is what you're wanting. See wild-goose chase, cream of the crop, rain cats and dogs, feet of clay, put a sock in it, out to lunch, hold one's horses, what's up, etc... EVula // talk // ☯ // 18:51, 29 November 2007 (UTC)

Ah beautiful. Well, I'd like to start a wiktionary entry for "keg is kicked". How do you tell the wiki search engine to find that specific entry when a user searches for variations such as "kicked keg", "kicking the keg", or killing the keg"?-boozerker 04:48, 30 November 2007 (UTC)

Just create redirects. EVula // talk // ☯ // 05:16, 30 November 2007 (UTC)

Hey,

I'm not sure if this is the right place to post this, if not please guide me.

I love Wikiquote, but it's hard to bring myself to regulary check out Wikiquote pages. Is there somebody in the Wiki community that is willing to build a small program that randomly displays one quote out of manually inserted Wikiquote urls during the last phase of the Windows or/and Mac OS startup?

If you think it's a good idea and you can build a program like this, please consider.

Floris from Belgium

Regarding #1, do you mean something like this? If so, I suggest searching Google with these keywords:

Wikipedia toolbar

and seeing what else you can find. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 14:41, 30 November 2007 (UTC)

Floris replying: Thank you John for helping me out with my other search; a Wikipedia search bar, it works well.

(Discussion transferred from

One of the problems that

WP:VPR and then dies because nobody wants to implement it; however, the code has already been written, and reviewed by developers, and it is currently live on the German Wikipedia (if you have an account on dewiki, go to de:Special:Preferences and click on the rightmost tab to see the new code in action). This makes it seem much more likely that if their is community consensus, that extension will be installed. At the moment, I'm just posting this suggestion here, to see if people interested in user scripts think that this is a good idea; if the conversation here seems encouraging, I'll link it from VPR and we can have a proper attempt to gain consensus here to make a request to devs to enable this feature. Does anyone else think this is a good (or bad) idea? I'm trying to gauge consensus, so even a 'me too' is useful here if you agree. --ais523 14:39, 19 November 2007 (UTC

)

Strong support from me. Slightly better link: de:Special:Preferences?uselang=en. Relevant bugs: mediazilla:11956 (done for de.wp) and mediazilla:12020 (done for fr.wp). The only thing I don't like is that Gadget code is included after user code, which is kind of limits the flexibility for CSS gadgets ∴ AlexSm 16:54, 19 November 2007 (UTC)

I suppose that it might sometimes be possible to override that using !important, but I agree that it isn't ideal. It's still a big improvement over the edit-your-monobook method, though. --ais523 10:46, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

I'll copy this to VPR in an attempt to get enough consensus for the devs, then. --ais523 12:12, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

I think that this feature would be helpful and useful for Wikipedians. In order for it to be enabled by developers, there will be a need for consensus here; if people agree with this – or have objections – it would be useful if they post here to establish whether there is the required consensus. --ais523 12:12, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

I agree it would be a good idea to have this. It is a lot easier to tick a box than to start pasting in javascript code. I do think however, it would be necessary to make especially sure that scripts made available like this are secure and don't do anything wrong, since they are more likely to be enabled by people who don't know entirely what they're doing.

(Talk)

20:04, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

Additionally, it would be wise to avoid some of the more complex and/or powerful script features whose effect may not be understood. Adrian M. H. 22:09, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

I think that it might be a good idea to screen which scripts are added beforehand. Nothing that's non-portable between browsers, or slow to run, or likely to be misused in ignorance by a new user, would be good ideas to add to the list; nor anything that requires configuration or is insecure. This still leaves many possibilities, though. --ais523 15:27, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

I love this idea in principle - there are a lot of really useful scripts of which most users are not aware, which can easily be made "features". On the other hand, I read the "Caveats" section on the mw: page, and it notes that this extension is explicitly not compatible with the CologneBlue skin. I presume that most people use Monobook, but how do we address this limitation? Nihiltres^{t.l} 16:20, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

It needs a change to the core software, rather than the extension: I've submitted bugzilla:12064 to request that a hook into the relevant place on non-Monobook-based skins be added so that the extension will work on them. --ais523 16:30, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

I support adding this extension to the wiki. :) FunPika 01:36, 25 November 2007 (UTC)

Support. It would be convenient. --Coppertwig (talk) 01:14, 28 November 2007 (UTC)

Request to the developers submitted, at bugzilla:12190. --ais523 19:35, 3 December 2007 (UTC)

It would appear the extension is up and running. :) FunPika 01:16, 4 December 2007 (UTC)

Cool. I've added

popups. Now someone needs to get lupin to rewrite the whole thing so you can still configure the script. (off default settings) :) Prodego ^talk

01:32, 4 December 2007 (UTC)

You messed up. MediaWiki:Gadgets-popups.js should be at MediaWiki:Gadget-popups.js. FunPika 02:23, 4 December 2007 (UTC)

I've started