Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Archive B

A separate reference page would be as straightforward to edit as articles currently are. And why implement a preference for showing or hiding references when you can have a simple links between two pages? Fredrik | talk 20:04, 21 Dec 2004 (UTC)

^5 Okay, I have been mulling over one further idea. I have to say I don't like the idea of going to a new page considering wikilag and slow wikiloadtimes, and perhaps we are asking too much of our developers to want so much automation (although, considering we are an encyclopedia, I consider an extensive footnote/endnote/bibliography system to be a high priority). What if we continue with the {{#|Ripley's Believe it or Not (1973). ''This is now my footnote''.}} train of thought, and have a single superscript footnote at that location, and when you hover your mouse over the footnote the citation in full appears. This would just bit a tiny bit of javascript and it would be very easy to implement. --Alterego 20:27, 21 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Having javascript as the only way to do anything important would be unacceptable. Wikipedia must work for people who use browsers that have javascript disabled. —AlanBarrett 20:58, 21 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Hey guys, it's really easy to simply bash down every idea that gets tossed out, but can we come up with some creative work arounds? I have found that usually, with just a little bit of creative and productive discussion there is a meeting ground that really works for most people. I agree that footnotes should work in Lynx et al. Perhaps it could also be rendered on the bottom as well using HTML. Hey look! Footnotes are working in the encyclo right now. The citation system

on this page looks really really nice and professional. Can we come up with a way to make getting our pages to look like that which is easy on both our editors, developers, and also our servers? --Alterego

21:07, 21 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Just to say I like it, and think it works very well. :ChrisG 10:25, 24 Dec 2004 (UTC)

The MLA has deprecated reference footnotes and reference endnotes for decades in favor of in-line bibliographic references. This author-date reference system according to the Oxford Guide to Style:

...is the most commonly used reference method in physical and social sciences. It provides the author's name and year of publication within parentheses in the text, and the full details at the end of the work in a list of references. It is in contrast to the author-title (short-title) system, which provides this information with a combination of footnotes or endnotes and the full reference at the end of the work.

This and similar systems is also covered in the Chicago Manual of Style (16.4–5). And it is recommended at

I say "yes" to sourcing and documentation. But I say "no" to any attempt to encourage old-fashioned, clunky, ugly, annoying, clumsy footnote referencing.

The modern author-date reference system works now, without any software enhancements and does not require a reader to continually jump to the bottom of page or end of an article to see if there is something there of value. And it is commonly used in books and research papers, possibly more commonly than the footnote method.

Footnoting software for Wikipedia seems to me to be a solution in search of a problem, and footnoting to provide references is generally a bad solution in my opinion, and increasingly so seen in modern scholarly writing which increasingly avoids it for reference purposes.

In Wikipedia you can reference a work which has its own article by linking to that article on first mention and reference other works by the author-date method and bibliography at the end of the article (or even make a reference at the bottom of the article to a standard bibliography at the end of a main article that covers a group of articles). And is there anyone who does not generally loathe endnotes in books, constantly jumping back and forth for trivial information that often could be enclosed in parentheses in the main text? Where a long endnote would appear in a book, or a long footnote, in Wikipedia the same result can usually be better achieved by an internal link to another article.

My goal is to encourage wikipedians to use author-date references in the same way they are used in books and research papers; to make it possible for the reader to validate what the writer is saying at every turn. The writer can expand upon important points without interrupting the flow of the work by creating related short articles or referring to an existing related article or by referring to a later section of the same article.

Jallan 01:26, 22 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I like Jallan's perspective, but I still believe footnotes have a reasonable use in wikipedia. Citing sources should be done with the MLA format, because that's standard, but for extratexual references, aside from just giving people a link to another wikipedia article which also may be very long, it would be helpful to provide a footnote explaining in greater detail the point being made. This is how footnotes are used in Legal writings; see any supreme court decision, for example, http://wikisource.org/wiki/Texas_v._Johnson shows how footnotes can be used to provide more information that doesn't fit in the flow of the opinion, but is relevant.

--

I fully accept using footnotes for cases where footnotes are arguably the best way of presentation, such as a two-level text involving both a main text and also extensive commentary as found in much legal writing (as

Soren9580 indicates) or in extensively annotated historical or literary texts. There is probably little call of this in encyclopedia articles. But it is certainly quite proper to use such an annotation system for the rare article that does cry out for two-level presentation. Tablular presentation or alternate sections of main text and annotation with typographical distinction between them are other solutions to two-level presentation, sometimes arguably superior to extensive footnoting and sometimes not. Jallan

15:32, 22 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Jallan, I don't understand the notion that footnotes should not be in Encyclopedia articles. Footnotes impart a wealth of metadata information, they are the original hypertext links, it is how readers can follow up and read more, if anything Wikipedia is the best place to use footnotes since they are another type of "link" and the "link" is what Wikipedia is all about. IMO it's not about fact checking, let's assume perfect world all the facts are correct -- we still need footnotes to link to sources outside of Wikipedia. Untill the 150 million books in existence have their own Wikipedia article entries that can be linked too directly, we need footnotes. --Stbalbach 03:44, 8 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Fredrik's idea of a "separate namespace that has for each article a list of references used in it" has since been archived and can be accessed at [1]. I've filed an enhancement request for Fredrik's idea at MediaZilla:1199. -- Paddu 19:57, 25 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Continued Discussion

After all of the discussion that has gone on, it seems a simple comprimise could be reached. Different articles will require different systems of footnoting. If someone could code a simple template - {{{#}}} - that simply inserted the number of its occurence in the article (eg {{{#}}} becomes 1 and {{{#}}} becomes 2), we could use wiki syntax to accomplish the rest. This is very similar to the numbering used for [2][3][4]. This would only be possible if it was processed before regular {{}} template commands, so that {{fnb|{{{#}}}}} became {{fnb|#}}. I am sure that this command would be useful for a wide variety of other applications as well. -- Alterego 00:27, 2004 Dec 30 (UTC)

I would just like to say (and this is totally POV) that MLA is a demon format and we should not use it if there is more than, say, one note. I'm not really convinced that encyclopedia articles need to footnote things anyway, but if we do use them, let us use a sensible footnote format, not MLA. Adam Bishop 18:34, 30 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Netoholic has now done this :) His much improved footnotes are in the format of {{fn}} and {{fnb}}. They are not autoincrementing, but you can rename them just like any other link, eg {{fn|1}} or {{fn|really long footnote}} becomes {{fn|1}} or {{fn|really long footnote}}; likewise, {{fnb|1}} or {{fnb|really long footnote}} become {{fnb|1}} and {{fnb|really long footnote}}

The actual code behind {{fn}} is

<sup id="fn_{{{1}}}_back">[[#fn_{{{1}}}|{{{1}}}]]</sup> 
{{fnb}} is <cite id="fn_{{{1}}}">[[#fn_{{{1}}}_back|Note {{{1}}}]]: </cite>

--Alterego 04:18, Jan 8, 2005 (UTC)

We could have Wikipedian categories for people interested. This could have a similar intent as the lists of Wikipedians, but might do more to give people with similar interests a place to congregate and converse. It would be less formal than the various projects. Maurreen 20:04, 12 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Do you mean adding a category or categories to your userpage to flag your interests? Filiocht 15:15, Dec 14, 2004 (UTC)

Yes. For instance, you could have Wikipedian butterfly collectors, or Wikipedian physicists, and so on. Maurreen 05:29, 15 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I like it, once we're careful not to add ourselves to article categories. Should we just start? Filiocht 11:26, Dec 15, 2004 (UTC)

Thinking about this, I'd first of all sign up to Category:Modernism, but this is an article category, so how about Category:Editing on modernism? Category:Editing on XXX could be a reasonable general structure for user page categories, maybe. Filiocht 11:47, Dec 15, 2004 (UTC)

I'd like to suggest using a naming convention such as Category:Wikipedian Modernists. It would be nice in the future if the software made it possible to designate any given namespace as acting like :Category and it might then be possible to migrate the designations. --Phil | Talk 12:53, Dec 15, 2004 (UTC)

Sounds good. Filiocht 13:26, Dec 15, 2004 (UTC)

I've started a few: Category:Wikipedian journalists, Category:Wikipedian military and Category:Wikipedian random pages. I put them all in Category:Wikipedians. Maurreen 16:43, 16 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I've added Category:Wikipedian modernists. Filiocht 10:10, Dec 17, 2004 (UTC)

Would it be possible (by some administrator, perhaps) to make categories within the User namespace for this purpose, rather than regular categories? That would allow catergories of User pages but keep them separate from the actual Wikipedia. Or was that what Phil just said is not possible on the current software? Sorry, I'm new, and a little confused... I know people will only put themselves into "Wikipedian _____" categories, but I still think it's desirable to keep User pages and the actual Wikipedia totally seperated. To separate the contributors and that which is contributed, as it were...TheNewAuk 05:18, 19 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I'd say we need a separate "Wikipedia Category" namespace, in which we can put both infrastructural categories like the wikipedia policies ones, and categories of users. I agree, we need strict separation between main and the other namespaces. &#0xfeff; --fvw* 21:46, 2004 Dec 21 (UTC)

I tried to add a catagory but I think my computer is broken, perhaps somebody would be kind enough to add it for me?. Wikipedians by IQ and/or credintials? Thanks. 10:31pm Dec 28 (PST)

I love WikiPedia, I love the random page function.

but ... Is anyone else annoyed at how often small town entries come up? It seems pointless to have "Nuclear_winter" and "Dacula,_Georgia" [with it's pop. of 3,848] in the same place.

A WikiAtlas would be a great project, but perhaps this is not the time.

Is there a way to seperate all these geographic entries from the rest?

I would say that inclusion of Wallaceton,_Pennsylvania is certainly non-encyclopedic ... unless you can open the WorldBook set and find Brights_Grove,_Ontario in there.

I believe that what people are saying when they say such things are unencyclopaedic is that one would not find such articles in a "real" encyclopaedia. Well guess what? Wikipedia is a real encyclopaedia, but is not constrained by the same issues as other encyclopaedias. Having such articles in Wikipedia is "a good thing". Most towns, however small, may even have history or attributes that are interesting to more than just those living in the town. And outside the US (i.e. the vast majority of the world!), this is all the more so the case. Most places in Ireland for example, even if a population of only a couple hundred, have hundreds of years of history and may have points of interest. I won't say notable points of interest, as we actually have "non-notable" castles in Ireland!!! They may indeed all some day have Wikipedia articles though!.

Separating out articles that one considers less worthy is not a sensible idea. It would only leave holes in Wikipedia. zoney ♣ talk 12:41, 5 Nov 2004 (UTC)

A better solution to the problem of RamBot articles cropping up in random searches would be to implement limiting Random page to include and/or exclude certain categories. There is no reason to factor out all geography articles in a separate project. — David Remahl 13:44, 5 Nov 2004 (UTC)

This topic was originally about the 'random page' link. I think it's a good idea to use a more popular selection of pages for the random pages, (if the point is to promote newcomers). If each small town gets its own page, the set from which the random page is drawn can still exclude those pages. Possible criteria for 'random page' consideration: size of article, number of reads, number of edits, being featured on the main page, etc. rmbh 08:01, Nov 19, 2004 (UTC)

well, but then it wouldn't be random anymore, would it? One of the uses of the random page button is to get an impression of what the average of those touted 400.000 articles looks like. being selective about them would be cheating, in my view, unless we quoted another number, e.g. "we have 398765 articles, 234567 of them larger than 2kb". use the 'random page' link to see a randomly selected member of the latter set."

dab

12:15, 19 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Sure it's still random! It's just not a representative random sampling. For example: all possible combinations of one letter and one number is much larger then the number of bingo balls, but it's still a bonified random sampling when the bingo caller draws one. Still, your point about producing "average" or representative page hits the nail on the head: what is the random page supposed to accomplish? Produce a representative sample of all of Wickipedia, or something interesting to act as a 'hook'? rmbh

[copy from Talk:Main Page]:

I agree that the town entries are fine. The only time where they ever get in the way is the random page button, which is a toy, anyway. However, "WikiAtlas" is an excellent idea! I have been wondering for some time how we could standardise custom maps. When I want to draw a map to explain a point in a specific article, I have to search for a public domain map of the area in question on google, and then maybe remove labels in an editor before adding my own information, arrows or whatever. The Xerox Mapserver has been gone for several years, and I don't know of a similarly useful tool to produce basic maps (e.g., the map of

dab

07:32, 4 Nov 2004 (UTC)

There is a discussion of this at meta:Wikiatlas. See also meta:Category:Wikimaps. Angela. 18:10, Nov 7, 2004 (UTC)

thank you.

dab

10:09, 8 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I started this one, and maybe I sent it in the wrong direction.

I'll readily admit that every town has a history, but most of the entries are no more than a location and population.

How about a way to do "random page" within a broad topic? Like Science or Art or Literature?

All I want is a way to browse with the "random page" button. I don't care if it's "a toy", because many people use it with serious intent. (like boning up for

Jeopardy

)

There's nothing wrong with small town entries, but maybe we need a broad category like Geographic Locations or somesuch to put :them in.

BigFatDave 02:59, 9 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Back to the map generation,

World Wind is a great piece of software for producing detailed, public domain, and high quality *physical* maps. For political maps it isn't as good - the only details that it can display are country borders and state/city/suburb names. -- Chuq

03:16, 9 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I'm glad Wikipedia has all this town information - don't remove it! But I think the real concern is that if the "random article" function primarily shows town, you don't see other categories. So, here's a proposal: why not store in a cookie what you 'last saw' in a random function (or the last 2-3), and the next time you ask for a Random page, make sure that the page is not in any category that you saw the last few times. This wouldn't be hard; pick a random page, and if it matches a previous category, try again (up to say 20 times). I think then you'd meet the real goal: you want the "random page" item to show you the many different categories of articles. I believe all the town articles are already marked by category, so this should work. Only problem is, someone will need to code that. I don't know if any developer thinks this is worth doing. If you like this idea, submit it as a feature request... Dwheeler 03:19, 2004 Dec 19 (UTC)

Rambot towns don't show up nearly as often as random pages as they used to--used to seem like 1 in 3 or 4--now it seems more like 1 in 10 or less. First 20 random pages I just got--seems like a decent balance of subjects (a bit US-centric, but that problem is gradually shrinking as well):

Dillinger (musician). Niteowlneils

00:31, 28 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Creating a library of reference material is a great idea; because we can check facts easier. But I think we will benefit the most from actually creating articles about these references. :ChrisG 13:32, 6 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Posted this elsewhere, but thought i'd give it a bit more exposure.

My point is that several subjects, most notably in politics and military are covered by several request categories, meaning that not all requested articles in these areas are placed in the same location.

Please reply to this post here. Grunners 16:41, 5 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Currently there is no direct way of knowing if an article I'm reading is a top notch Featured Article. To know if it is I have to check out its talk page, a waste of time. I propose we keep a small star (like the barnstar) or symbol on the top right hand corner of an article, so that a reader may get an instant knowledge that the mentioned article is the crème de la crème of Wikipedia. Nichalp 19:26, Jan 2, 2005 (UTC)

Good idea. Maurreen 00:52, 3 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I also think it's a good idea. It would certainly more useful than, say, {{stub}} — after all, it's very obvious to a reader when an article is a stub, but it's not always so obvious how thoroughly an article has been reviewed. The Featured Article process is our only real system for identifying and vetting high-quality articles, and I think it would be sensible to convey the results of this process to readers directly, rather than hide it away on a Talk: page. — Matt Crypto 01:49, 3 Jan 2005 (UTC)

It always struck me as odd that the featured Article (candidate) notice was on the talk page, where very few people see it. I would wholeheartedly support the FA & FAC messages being addd to the top of the article page directly. Same for featured images -- Chris 73 Talk 03:31, Jan 3, 2005 (UTC)

Hmm, — Matt Crypto makes an interesting point -- the "Featured Article" process is a current Wikipedia process for vetting high-quality articles. I wonder if the "featured article" process could be extended/expanded/whatever to deal with the "how can I trust Wikipedia" issue. It's just a thought..! -- Dwheeler 05:46, 2005 Jan 4 (UTC)

I think this is a great idea. It might take a bit of work to get it ready, but I reckon it would make maintenance of FA easier. It would also make finding articles suitable for

Talk

14:54, 4 Jan 2005 (UTC)

This has been discussed before at

self-references in Wikipedia. Evil Monkey → Talk

08:06, Jan 5, 2005 (UTC)

A "no self-references" argument doesn't seem very strong here; for one, it would be implemented as a Template, making it easier for downstream users to avoid any reference to Wikipedia. Moreover, we have plenty of messages that we're quite happy to slap on articles whenever there's a defect in it, for example, {{wrongtitle}}, {{NPOV}} etc — and even informative messages like {{wikiquote}}.

One argument I've heard before which is perhaps more persuasive is that we don't want to litter up articles with too much cruft and extraneous meta-data. While a full-sized {{featured}} box might be too intrusive, perhaps we could whip up a non-intrusive, more subtle marker of some sort. Any ideas? — Matt Crypto 09:55, 5 Jan 2005 (UTC)

This idea has been discussed and rejected before. In general I am strongly opposed to cluttering articles with templates, but in this case as long as it is something small and discrete (i.e. not this) I think this would be a good idea. Such a template would be of use to readers, which is the requirement for adding something to the article namespace. My ideal would be to have a star, or some other symbol, placed in the white space on the top right of featured articles, with the star linking to featured articles. Unlike a template, however, this more subtle marker would require work by a developer. - SimonP 18:04, Jan 5, 2005 (UTC)

Templates mar the beauty of a FA which has passed the rigours it is subjected to. A small symbol like a star which floats left can certainly do the trick without eating up too much space. Nichalp 19:08, Jan 5, 2005 (UTC)

Well we could put FAs into a category:Featured Articles, and perhaps go one step further and replace the FA category name with a smaller version of one of Alexandre Van de Sande stars in the category block at the bottom of the page. -- Solipsist 19:50, 5 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Actually they are already categorised though by their talk pages in Category:Wikipedia featured articles. Evil Monkey → Talk 20:15, Jan 5, 2005 (UTC)

I want the reader to know that the article in question is a quality article as soon as the page loads - right there on top; not after he has finished reading (notice at the bottom). Nichalp 20:43, Jan 6, 2005 (UTC)

See this is what I mean. (Note the article in question is not a FA. I concocted the image with a random page with a barnstar). Nichalp 18:59, Jan 20, 2005 (UTC)

along the lines of "semantic Wikipedia",

I am doing a small part to help. I want to ask the community in the English wikipedia to help a littlebit also. In the Dutch wikipedia we have put an announcement on all pages with a banner pointing towards a page where you can find details to donate money. Can the English wikipedia please do the same and help this littlebit also. We are building an encyclopedia. But this is a disaster that hit everybody ..... so please help out the relief effort by doing this. Waerth 18:13, 31 Dec 2004 (UTC)

If these ideas have already been talked about or implemented, I apologize. But it would be cool, if:

• A database of common misspellings (and possibly even common bad grammar phrases) were developed, and a bot periodically run to identify articles with the misspellings from the list.
• A bot was periodically run to identify dead links supplied as external links in articles. As links sometimes go down for short periods and return to normal, there would have to be a way of identifying how long a link has been down and the reason (40x or 50x). Even identifying redirects would be useful so they could be corrected to the new URL.

I don't have the time to implement these myself, but in my view, these kind of bots could do a lot of useful work for the Wikipedia, in helping to identify simple errors faster and thus help Wikipedia help project an even higher quality. Any thoughts?

Spelling bots are not trusted to operate autonomously. I think that's explicitly stated somewhere. -- Cyrius|✎ 22:56, 28 Dec 2004 (UTC)

At any rate, I was thinking these bots would generate listings of articles to check manually, rather than directly making updates to the articles. --

Stevietheman

00:54, 29 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Oh, if that's all you want, you don't want a bot. Just go to http://download.wikimedia.org/ and grab the database dumps. Then run queries. Much more thorough and efficient, albiet a few days behind. Several people are doing this sort of thing already (see Wikipedia:Offline reports). -- Cyrius|✎ 06:39, 29 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Thanks. I think doing something like this to check dead links would work well, but checking all the common misspellings would be a great chore, in that I don't have a comprehensive list of common misspellings to check against--I was thinking that as part of this idea Wikipedians could compile one somehow. --

Stevietheman

15:58, 30 Dec 2004 (UTC)

You mean like

• A featured article is represented by a star. Oh!
• A featured article is made of tiny fractal pieces.
• In fact, it is written that way: someone writes a big piece and then a others fit it right. When you get a bunch of big pieces well fit, you've got a great article.
• You can still add more on a featured article, so it can always grow.

--Alexandre Van de Sande 14:56, 26 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Oooh, very pretty. I'm not very active on the Featured Articles front, but I think this is a big improvement, as cosmetic improvements go. --fvw* 17:55, 2004 Dec 26 (UTC)

The FAC one doesn't look that good to me with my screen resolution as the star is not fully contained with in the template box.Evil Monkey → Talk 20:55, Dec 26, 2004 (UTC)

I like it :) Dan100 11:18, Dec 27, 2004 (UTC)

The single "star point" to the far right of the "This is a feature article." image seems to have two "smudges" a larger one just above an a bit to the left, and a smaller one to the left. Can somone fix this? Paul August ☎ 00:53, Jan 5, 2005 (UTC)

Ok I just relized that it is this image image:Star piece.png which has the problem. Paul August ☎ 01:00, Jan 5, 2005 (UTC)

For the FAC one, I fixed the HTML so that it appears correctly on non-

This article is a current featured article candidate.

Please visit Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Village pump (proposals)/Archive B to support or contest the nomination. Village pump (proposals)/Archive B

--Redquark 21:07, 27 Dec 2004 (UTC)

• I've changed it so it looks like this:

This article is a current featured article candidate. Please comment on that page to support or contest the nomination. [[Category:Wikipedia featured article candidates|{{PAGENAME}}]]

...because it was displaying badly in Firefox. I've checked and it now appears to work equally well in IE and FF. Rdsmith4 17:33, 28 Dec 2004 (UTC)

• • I've proposed a wikitable-based alternative with tooltips on the talk page: let discussion ensue (but keep it kind folks, I'm delicate ;-) --Phil | Talk 10:06, Jan 7, 2005 (UTC)

If you look at Yahoo's news headlines, you'll see that trivial bits of news trickle in every minute. For example, Brad Pitt splits with his wife, or Polaroid gets acquired. These are trivial bits of news, because Wikipedia articles on these topics already exist, all that is required is a single sentence to make the Wikipedia articles current again.

In both cases (Polaroid and Brad Pitt) I was surprised that after a few hours in the news, the Wikipedia articles hadn't been updated yet. People expect that Wikipedia articles are not only accurate, but also current. Therefore I propose having people on standby, perhaps assigning people per hour of the day to monitor news sites, and making corresponding trivial updates to Wikipedia articles. Again, most of the time the update should only require a single sentence, so this would be an easy job.

The advantage with this approach would be that ALL current news events would quickly be reflected in Wikipedia articles. Without this approach, it would take someone who is specifically interested in the Brad Pitt or Polaroid Wikipedia articles, to update them, so it could take weeks for such updates to appear on Wikipedia. Jawed 08:03, 9 Jan 2005 (UTC)

That's a nice idea, but I am generally against deciding social organization whimsically. If you can gather enough volunteers or spend time constantly in #wikipedia asking others to do it, your scheme will work. If you are serious about gathering volunteers, please reword your proposal to make that easy to see. People can list themselves as volunteers below. If there are so many it would be inefficient to organize through chatting or user talk, perhaps a schedule page could be made. However, I don't think new pages should be added (increasing complexity and verbosity needlessly) until then, though. The Duke Nukem Forever effect is not very pleasing. 68.112.220.182 17:16, 9 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedians could review books, and post their reviews on pages named after the books' titles. A page named "Book Reviews" might be reserved to list all reviews in categories.--66.180.178.12 14:59, 8 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedia articles are not critical reviews. Reviews typically include lots of subjective opinion and original research, which wouldn't fit in with Wikipedia's policies of NPOV and Wikipedia:No original research. — Matt Crypto 15:27, 8 Jan 2005 (UTC)

What you could do is write a synopsis or analysis. For instance the Cole's Notes style analysis at Catch-22, and its spin-off articles on the major characters, is considered encyclopedic. But don't try this level of analysis on a pulp novel. --Tony Sidaway|Talk 15:58, 8 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Can we remove or alter the numbering system that has popped up (I think) recently on new sections? Either it's a recent change to the site's coding or it's always been there and I've just now noticed it. On Current Events (and, well, everywhere else) we have sections with numbers in front of the section names that make them read not quite right. For instance in Current Events, there's "===Deaths in January===," which reads as "1 Deaths in January," followed by "===Ongoing Events===," which reads as "2 Ongoing Events." Could we at least have periods in front of the numbers? As it is, we've got "3 Ongoing Armed Conflicts" and "4 Upcoming Holidays." Sounds rather odd. Mr. Billion 23:07, 7 Jan 2005 (UTC)

The numbering is controlled in user preferences, although it is known to inexplicably enable itself temporarily. -- Cyrius|✎ 00:42, 8 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Ah, of course. Thanks. Mr. Billion 02:51, 8 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Might it not be an intellectually profitable idea to have on this page (Literary Criticism) a link pointing to a page where Wikipedia users might post links to book reviews they write? They might name the pages the same as the titles of the books they review, and then list/post links to those pages on a page named Book Reviews by Wikipedians. Please consider this idea for the future.

If you would like to put your book reviews on another server and link to that server from your User page, there's nothing wrong with that. RickK 00:26, Jan 9, 2005 (UTC)

Hello I'm interested in some feedback to an idea of mine by the English speaking community. Until now I got some quite nice comments from users of the German speaking community, so I'm very interested how other communities think about it (if this is not the right place to post this here please point me to the right one):

Abstract: Provide an algorithm based article commit check system in MediaWiki similar to the current edit conflict to reduce unwanted edits (vandalism, flames on discussion pages, edit wars, stubs). The proposed ideas are strictly based on certain formal aspects of editing. This is no suggestion about censoring of articles by content. Those algorithms are based on formal aspects of common sense e.g. about length and structure of articles.

Full proposal can be found at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Edit_hints

Please make changes to the proposal, comments and votes directly in the article (or in its talk page) and not here. I discussed this proposal (beside other things) quite a lot with other wikipedia/wikimedia people at the 21. Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin and tried to make a summary of all ideas (and detailed pros and contras). Arnomane 20:34, 6 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I strongly encourage people to read this proposal. Although almost all of the votes so far are positive, I am so totally opposed to this that if it is adopted, I will probably quit being actively involved in Wikipedia. I have added extensively to the lists of drawbacks and have also made some comments at m:Talk:Edit rules#A really bad idea. -- Jmabel | Talk 20:11, Jan 7, 2005 (UTC)

Thanks a lot for your feedback and of course also for new aspects and ideas I didn't think of before. I have now embedded them into my proposal and have clarified some very important aspects of it (please read especially the implementation section before you judge about the proposal). I also have written some detailed answers to the concerns on the articles talk page. So it would be nice if those who are interested in (be it that they like or dislike it) will read the changes and my answers on the talk page and perhapes give further feedback and hopefully now feel better with my proposal. P.S. Jmabel: It is my main concern from the first beginnings of this idea that all people can feel comfortable with it. It started all with a post of mine at the german wikipedia mailing list some months ago, cause I was fed up with a flame war about stubs (delete or not delete) and wanted to have a solution that everyone can accept and at the moment I'm the only person actively trying to convince others of this idea. -- Please answer again directly in Meta. Arnomane 14:30, 8 Jan 2005 (UTC)

OK, it appears that

I have moved this proposal, from User:66.180.178.12, to the Village Pump, from the main namespace article Annotate the Bible where he created it

I have created a e-text system which creates a link from every line of the text to a note point, and from that note point back to the line. It is an attractive and very instructive way to read a text.

I have, as a first project, processed the text of the American Revised Version of the Holy Bible with my program, which I call e-RAIN, for electronic references, annotations, indexes and notes.

To make my system available to wikipedia users, I could paste each page of five hundred lines to a separate wikipedia page. The numbers of the lines would be the same as with the e-RAIN version.

Then, a user could make a note, and post it alongside or after the line. The next line would be separated by the line number.

Then, when I'm up and running, I could copypaste the notes to the e-RAIN version which will reside on its own site.

I am also interested in doing the same thing to the Complete Works of William Shakespeare, and other Classics.

I think annotated Wikitexts, such as the bible, are a neat idea. WikiSource would be the place for it, probably. We would need to provide a method of copying the text of the document without the footnotes though. There is already a footnote system of which you speak here, by the way. {{fn}} and {{fnb}}. --Alterego 23:29, Jan 6, 2005 (UTC)

Definitely Wikisource material. Definitely not Wikipedia material. JRM 23:49, 2005 Jan 6 (UTC)

Agreed, but a fascinating idea nonetheless. In the interests of fairness and balance, other religious texts such as the Qu'ran should high on the list of other works to be done. Grutness|^hello?

I'm sure that this has been suggested before, but it's worth a try. Would it be a good idea to either create a User:Exampleuser or simply make talkpages for him or her. The point in this would be that it could show newbies what could typically go on their userpages, and how to use and manage talkpages and so on. If anybody else has views on this, please either reply here and let me know on my talkpage when you've done so, or reply on my talkpage. Thanks,--Gabriel (internal ID number: 118170) 08:35, 2 Jan 2005 (UTC)

• As long as it is used to present suggestions (self-description, list of started articles, etc). It should not give an impression that only certain kind of userpages are allowed. - Skysmith 09:49, 3 Jan 2005 (UTC)

How about creating something like a "Featured user page" election? People could nominate (good-looking, well-designed, interesting, funny, etc.) user pages they've come across. Once a week or so, the "best" page would be elected by user voting and could then receive a link from an appropriate help page. Of course, all this would be a bit more low-key than the Featured Article process, but it might be a fun way to put some hard-working Wikipedians in the spotlight (and set an example for new users as well). --Plek 21:00, 9 Jan 2005 (UTC)

After monitering my watchlist and the Recent Changes page for awhile, I've found that there are some pages which attract much more vandalism then others.

I would like to propose a new protection level for admins to apply to a page, something along the lines of "high risk".

What this new status would do would prevent anonymous users from editing, but would still allow logged in wikipedians to do so. Sort of like a milder version of protecting a page. I feel this would be of considerable benefit, expecially on pages which are vandalised almost daily. Oberiko 00:13, 18 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I like this idea!! Currently, if something is starting to get vandalized a lot, we often end up locking it up completely, which is unfortunate. This idea gives us a nice intermediate stage to use instead... if the vandalism is from anons, then instead of blocking entirely, we can only block anons. Dwheeler 00:32, 2004 Dec 18 (UTC)

I think the "recent changes" page should include some sort of marker on any edit of a 'high risk' page, again, so that it can get more scrutiny. Dwheeler 01:35, 2004 Dec 18 (UTC)

In the long term, I think it'd be useful to see a range of protection levels. E.G.: Anyone can edit, only logged-in can edit, only 'good standing' users can edit (varying levels of standing), through protection. 'Good standing' might simply mean "account around for more than 30 days, contributed over 50 edits in at least 3 different days, and their last 50 edits have not been reverted or sysop-deleted". Eventually a few levels that can be decided automatically, and perhaps a level or two bestowed by humans. Giving humans rankings based on the quality and trustworthiness of their contributions might really incentivize people to create good stuff, and it gives others a nice way to reward those doing good. And by having a sliding scale to protect problem pages, if vandalism on a page starts, you can raise the protection up by only the minimum necessary to stop the problem; currently protection is kindof an all-or-nothing sort of thing. Anyway, it's an interesting thought. Dwheeler 01:35, 2004 Dec 18 (UTC)

I'm not opposed to experiments, but lately a lot of vandals seem to be switching to single-use accounts instead of editing under IPs. I doubt that anything short of some kind of a "good standing" account would mean much. -- Jmabel | Talk 01:37, Dec 18, 2004 (UTC)

I've also noticed a bit of single-use accounts, but from what I've seen, that's the vast minority. Not nearly as many would-be vandals are willing to go and create an account just to put "Hitler was a fruit loop" on a page on World War II.

And even if they did, it would allow use a much easier time of tracking and banning, helping use steer away from the broad blocking of an IP range which might lock-out good users.

I like the ideas about the four level spectrum of protection (none, low risk, high risk, protected) and marking them so on the Recent Changes. It would certainly make any policing of the Wikipedia I do much easier at least.

For the "good standing" accounts, thirty days is probably overkill. In most cases, I'd think an hour would do it. Oberiko 03:03, 18 Dec 2004 (UTC)

That may be for now, but if true, one reason may be because there's no need to do anything else. If there was an automated mechanism that demanded that people demonstrate at least a few reasonable contributions and some calendar time before being allowed to fiddle with "higher risk" pages, then we might curb some problems without having to always turn on "protected". And putting on my rose-colored glasses, perhaps by requiring vandals to contribute nicely first, we might get some of them to change their tune.... or at least get some useful work out of them :-). I suspect experimentation will be an absolute requirement before finding out what's optimal. To be honest, in the longer term I like the idea of rewarding contributors with higher 'ranks'. I believe Napolean famously noted that men will die for brightly colored strips of cloth (ribbons), and while those ranks are in many senses a game, the game would have the nice side-effect of rewarding desirable behavior. It might also help people gain confidence in Wikipedia itself: you can explain that Wikipedia rewards good contributors. Dwheeler 15:09, 2004 Dec 18 (UTC)

I am very much in favour of this. While I'm not suggesting this is scientific estimate it is approximately 0.1% of the articles that result in 50% of the work in terms of resolving edit wars and vandalism. If we have a subtle protection mechanism for these pages, then it will allow those people patrolling Wikipedia to do more useful things.

For most of those controversial pages and anon ban would be a good enough. For most of the others a one hour account would be sufficient. It would only be a very small minority which would need a 30 day edit rule.

Further in the future I would like the ability to ban individual users from certain pages. There are a number of contributors who while perfectly sensible about most topics, should avoid contributing on the topics they can't maintain a NPOV. Bans over various time periods would provide flexibility here as well. If we had that level of granularity then we could dissolve many of the problems we have between registered users. We wouldn't have to protect pages from editing, we would just have to protect pages from users. :ChrisG 12:11, 19 Dec 2004 (UTC)

This makes me think of another, less restrictive, possibility; I'm not sure how hard it would be to implement. Might we be able to make it possible for a user to set up a second watchlist, so admins easily set up a second, smaller watchlist just to watch frequently vandalized pages? -- Jmabel | Talk 19:13, Dec 19, 2004 (UTC)

I like the previous idea (about blocking anon edits on some pages) too, I had been thinking about it for so long myself. Though I am not too sure about protecting pages from user. Someone who can cross the boundary on one article can cross the boundary on any article. Anyway, about second watchlist, I saw JesseW use an "Important Watch list" on his user page. I asked him how he made it and this is what he told me I made a list of important pages on a subpage of my user page, clicked on "Related changes", copied the URL, edited my user page and copied the URL into a single bracket form with the "Important Watchlist" label. Does that explain it? JesseW 00:39, 20 Nov 2004 (UTC). It almost is a second watchlist and anyone can use it. --Ankur 15:03, 27 Dec 2004 (UTC)

There are two classes of people: those who can't surmount an IP ban and those who can. Those who can't are easily controlled by the current ban system. Those who can aren't easily controlled by any technical measure. It takes human intelligence to push back against them, and the bureaucrats' jobs are not going to be any easier than they are now. Putting more and more and more and more annoying, permanent road bumps in a lot of people's way to temporarily save bureaucrats a little effort is what I expect from Congress, not Wikipedia, which is supposedly much freer in spirit. Technical solutions to social problems are generally stupid. 68.112.220.182 17:42, 9 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Determine "high risk" scientifically

It's a great idea to keep an eye on "high-risk" articles. But rather than simply guessing at which pages are "high risk" and treating them specially, might it not be better to establish scientifically which articles are "high risk"? The software can determine when an edit is a revert to a previous version. It's a simple matter of programming, then, to extract which articles are the most reverted, in any of the following forms:

• Greatest number of revert edits in the past week
• Greatest number of revert edits over the article's history
• Highest ratio of reverts to non-revert edits in the past week
• Highest ratio of reverts to non-revert edits over the article's history
• Highest frequency of reverts (fastest reverting, which suggests that someone is monitoring it)

Presumably, the "over the article's history" summaries would be somewhat more database-intensive and shouldn't be done in real time. The "weekly" ones I'm guessing would be not much more intensive than Recent Changes.

Gathering and using these statistics avoids the selection bias inherent in using watchlists to monitor misbehavior. It gives calmer heads a guide of where the heat is on -- be it vandalism or edit-warring. Moreover, it would also give us objective data about the nature and extent of vandalism and edit-warring, which can contribute to the creation of future policy.

For what it's worth, I don't think that blocking anonymous contributors from "high-risk" articles would be a good idea until we have better data on just what that would mean. Gathering data on revert rates would be a step in that direction. --FOo 07:06, 10 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I am sure that recipes have been suggested, but I would like to see recipes with the following information.

• Title
• Origins
• Ingredients : what is in the recipe
• What is not in the recipe (e.g. meat, fish, eggs, milk).
• Method
• Serving suggestions
• Good with...
• Optional images

The categories "What is not in the recipe" could include "yeast free", "dairy free", "wheat free", "no nuts", "citrus fruit free", etc and these terms should be standardized.

This would be an asset to those who suffer food intolerance since you could search the database for those items you cannot eat, and then choose set of recipes.

LoopZilla 10:24, 14 Jan 2005 (UTC)

• Recipes are in the wikibooks - Skysmith 11:23, 14 Jan 2005 (UTC)

• Also, there is a similar website called recipesource.com where you can submit recipes and browse through the collection. --Munchkinguy 20:02, 14 Jan 2005 (UTC)

• You are welcome to add recipes to Wikipedia, but please do make the article encyclopedic, so stick to recipes of cultural value, and add encyclopedic information with the recipe. SweetLittleFluffyThing

What if Wiki pages were automatically translated and placed on other-language Wiki's with a notice such as 'No matching article was found, however the below article was found in the English wiki and automatically translated. Please click here if you would like to correct the translation.'?

This may only work between certain languages, but is it worth pursuing? I tried translating a few random Spanish Wiki pages to English with Babel Fish and the results were better than I expected, certainly better than nothing. --Jperlin 07:36, Jan 14, 2005 (UTC)

Sounds ok to me, as long as the translated article still retains it's content and nothing is mistranslated. In other words, articles translated this way need double checking. SunTzu2 08:26, 14 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Doesn't sound OK to me. There are all sorts of reasons this is not a good idea. Please see

Wikipedia:Translation into English and Wikipedia:Pages needing translation into English

for some further discussion of this. The short of it is that if someone wants to use Babelfish etc. to read a foreign-language article, they can do that themselves. Auto-translated articles really bring down the tone of the site; auto-translated versions of articles from foreign Wikipedias are, in fact subject to deletion.

Automatic translation is a good tool for translators. It's a perfectly good way to get a first draft of an article that you will promptly edit closely, as it can "batch translate" a lot of the content of an article. However, automatic translations need to be checked closely: besides often atrocious grammar, they also introduce errors such as "translating" names (e.g. "Giuseppe Verdi" can become "Giuseppe Green") or picking the most common meaning of a word that, in fact, is being used differently in the present context. -- Jmabel | Talk 18:50, Jan 14, 2005 (UTC)

forget it. at most we could have bots dumping auto-translated articles to subpages of existing, and interwikied, stubs, and drop a note on the talkpage "if anyone wants to look at this, I dumped an autotranslation /there." But it is much preferable to have humans do this, i.e. find an excellent foreign language article to a stub in their own language, auto-translate it, and see what they can make of it.

dab (ᛏ)

19:39, 14 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Anonymous request, but wasn't this already proposed? Peter O. (Talk) 19:08, Jan 11, 2005 (UTC)

pointless. we have categories for browsing. the only 'serious' use for the 'random' button is doing surveys of 'average WP'. If you filter it, it's not random anymore.

I see some pages have a lot of archives already, I would like to suggest if we could make a page dedicate to archive content. It's like the content table in every article, but it has several content tables(according to the number of archive pages), rather than one. Roscoe x 20:26, 9 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Your proposal is very unclear. What do you have in mind? -- Jmabel | Talk 23:36, Jan 9, 2005 (UTC)

Hm... a page with something like this.

With 'content?' were linked to the specific topic, so we could have fast access to old archive data. I hope that would clarify what I thought. Roscoe x 12:38, 10 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I suspect that any proposal to automate the generation of these will not get a high enough priority to make it to the top of the developers' list, but for pages where you think this would be useful, you can create a template like this and insclude it in the relevant main page and its archives. It would take a little bit of maintenance work, but since archives are usually systematically numbered, you can probably include the next, say, half dozen archive pages as red links, so you wouldn't have to revisit them very often. -- Jmabel | Talk 20:05, Jan 10, 2005 (UTC)

Or you could just make an archive directory as you go along, without needing templates or tables. Maurreen 03:47, 11 Jan 2005 (UTC)

On this website there is a login bar at the top of the page with a link to register. Would that be possible on WP, it would make things so much easier. Please reply here rather than on my talkpage, see my talkpage for reason.--Gabriel (internal ID number: 118170) 17:49, 9 Jan 2005 (UTC)

While it makes it simple for those few who log in and don't choose to remain logged in by checking the box, it clutters the screen in a distracting way for those who don't edit and simply use Wikipedia for the content. 68.112.220.182 20:00, 9 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I don't see a real use in allowing -- to stand for two hyphens. Most people use it incorrectly, meaning a dash (—). Correcting that takes time and energy and clogs up the source of articles with unnecessary HTML entities. It would be great if the wiki software automatically changed -- to —. 68.112.220.182 19:55, 9 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Hell yes. Since -- is intended to be an em dash —, it should be rendered as such — EXCEPT in signatures. Anárion (talk) 20:01, 9 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I agree, this would be a useful feature to add to the auto-wiki markup. However, it should correctly differentiate between em and en dashes. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that em dashes do not have spaces on either side (e.g. blah blah blah—blah blah blah), whereas en dashes do have a space (e.g. blah blah blah – blah blah blah). —thames 03:43, 12 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Do people use two hyphens for an en dash? I only use one, as in '1934-1945'. (That is, when I forget to code them.) —Mike 03:58, Jan 12, 2005 (UTC)

Usage differs, but essentially that's correct. It's either word—word, or word – word. However, many now seem to also use word — word. "Correct" use calls for

hair spaces surrounding the em dash, but virtually no fonts support this character, so it will result in an ugly box: word — word. Anárion (talk

) 08:20, 12 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Not sure if this belongs here or in technical... Since the 1.4 upgrade, big categories no longer list all items on the first page, but break the category into 200-article chunks. All well and good, but is there any way that the total number of items could also be displayed (sort of like the Google-styled "displaying items 201-400 out of 2371")? A similar thing would be very useful on the search results, too. Grutness|^hello? 00:31, 7 Jan 2005 (UTC)

It would also be useful to 1-count the number of images in a category, period, and 2-have sub-categories listed independently of the no-more-than-200-per-page system. It's very difficult to track down all of the sub-categories of a large category as things currently stand. (This makes sub-categories for those categories effectively useless.) -Aranel ("Sarah") 18:33, 13 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I suggest adding underneath the edit box a short, simple message:

Please cite your sources so others can check your work.

If some people think that's a good idea, and others don't, perhaps we could try it out for a few days as an experiment and see if there's any harm.

There's an infinite number of style suggestions, but for other stuff, it's easy to fix things later. Formatting weird? You can fix it. Bad grammar? You can fix it. POV? Usually you can fix that too, IF you can find out where the data came from. But if you've no idea where the info came from, it's really difficult to do fact-checking later. Thus, I think citing sources is unique - it's more difficult to fix later. I'm not perfect, but I try to do this. Reminding people -- and especially telling newcomers -- would make it more likely to happen.

In particular, I think this would help deal with one of the main complaints about Wikipedia: "Can I trust it?" With sources cited, you can check things yourself, and many people have greater trust in an article when the citations are included. It also makes the fact-checking folk's work easier/possible. -- Dwheeler 23:33, 2004 Dec 17 (UTC)

I've seen absolutely zero protests about this, after 4 days, and this can easily be undone. People who only read Wikipedia won't even notice! So, I've given this change a whirl -- hopefully others will like it! Dwheeler 23:52, 2004 Dec 21 (UTC)

Actually, I don't like it. It adds even more information to the bottom, which even less people read. And, frankly, citations are in my opinion only a small priority for the user to understand. I personally prefer the old version, it puts much less load on the user. -- Chris 73 Talk 02:15, Dec 22, 2004 (UTC)

Sorry you don't like it. But I think citations are absolutely vital; as I noted above, everything else can typically fixed by at least some other user (NPOV, etc.), but without a citation, it's really hard to make progress. This simply reminds people of a policy that's already in place, but all too often unintentionally forgotten. And it's not much text, so it shouldn't have too much load on the user. Anyway, this is obviously trivial to reverse. Let's see what others think about it, and go from there. -- Dwheeler 02:53, 2004 Dec 22 (UTC)

I agree completely with

Soren9580

04:01, 22 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I tend to agree with Dwheeler. When I first found this place, it was over a nutrition subject in which I learned that a certain nutrient isn't contained in a type of food a very ill family member was eating regularly to receive that nutrient from. Without source checking however, I have no idea if the information I read here is correct or just someone's opinion. This didn't occur to me till recently because I originally blindly accepted the info I read in the article as fact and made dietary health purchase decisions based on this. So I think we should cite sources where we can, such as when making statements like "spinach has oxalic acid in it which blocks the absorption of iron." The statement is true, I'm sure, but people need to know where it came from. -Emerman, December 28, 2004, 11:40 a.m. Eastern.

We should realize that many people write articles from their own experience or knowledge, and don't necessarily have a source to cite. I don't think we should unnecessarily hamstring article development by making this an absolutely hard requuirement. Keeping it as a recommendation is fair however. --

Stevietheman

16:46, 28 Dec 2004 (UTC)

This doesn't hamstring article development. It's just a recommendation/plea. The text says "Please cite your sources so others can check your work." All it says is "please", it certainly doesn't say "you must". It doesn't stop you from adding pages with references! But a lot of people actually know where their info came from, if only we reminded them to tell us. -- Dwheeler

Point taken, but if some people are discouraged from contributing because they think that have to provide a source, based on the "Please", then that's something to think about. --

Stevietheman

00:57, 29 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I understand. Personally, I doubt that will become an issue. -- Dwheeler 17:05, 2004 Dec 30 (UTC)

I am definitely not a Wikipedia authority. However, I've scanned the VfD pages, and those guys are forced to Google every single time because no one cited any source whatsoever. Citation simply makes an article credible. Does it take extra work? Oh, yeah. Does it make a difference? Rhetorical question.

All for it! allie 18:50, 8 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Sources are needed, of course, but as a minimum i would make the comment below the edit box not bold, since this distracts from the DO NOT SUBMIT COPYRIGHTED WORK WITHOUT PERMISSION!, which I think is way more important. -- Chris 73 Talk 00:34, Jan 12, 2005 (UTC)

How about putting up a couple of rich interesting literary works in full text - making it possible for any old reader to go to a point in the text and attach a note/footnote etc that could :define an unusual work; identify a location or building or historical or mythical character or any other reference; identify a source; suggest an interpretation; make a connection with other point in the text, etc. Over time we would have an extremely interesting thoroughly annotated text. [by anonymous]

You might want to try Wikibooks or Wikisource. RickK 00:58, Jan 16, 2005 (UTC)

I am concerned about how easy is for people to download and save wkipedia database, witch i find difficult now. i think that if we save less.... we can save more, because more people will download the database. At the same time the servers are getting overloaded and from what i saw there is a nead for multiple hard disks inside the database servers.

This is more related to madiawiki, but anyway, we should be able to delete archives older than 3 months maybe, after a vote. I dont know if this is possilbe alredy but thanks to tell me that. This may alrady be implemented since this page does not have very old archives...

seccond proposal: We nead also a system that will show us how offten the backups were made. The most simple is a nomal wiki table where each time someone makes a backup he writes a line in the table (maybe his country, etc...). Of course we cannot check the backup was real, we must trust people... Anyway it should be a good begeining in knowing how many people did the backup.

bittorrent is a good idea if you want more people to download the database. 'because a project as big as wikipedia and wiki* should be backuped in most big countries of the earth at least by one or two people in each country (at least every 6 months); this is somethink around more than 60 backups every 6 months, about 10 every month, this is one backup every 3 days. Of course to save bandwith we can use bittorrent with no problem :)

Finaly the backups are generated every week, but once every month is enaught. Hey, we are speaking here about backups in the case somethink very bad happends with the main servers, and this does not happened every week :) Moa3333 01:47, 15 Jan 2005 (UTC)

There's a difference between backup, which should be happening on a continuous basis for a site like Wikipedia, and the ability of users to make their own copies of the database. If the servers are destroyed in a fire at the co-location place which houses them, then I would expect all but the last few edits to be restored when the servers are replaced. If the whole of southern Florida is wiped out, I still would expect at the very most a day's worth of edits to be lost, irrespective of any user backups made.

The problem with deleting archives older than a certain date is that the terms of the

GFDL under which all content on Wikipedia is licensed (more or less) requires attribution to be kept for all authors. We keep this attribution in the article histories.-gadfium

02:05, 15 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I rethinked my proposal, and if somethink bad happends we only nead the current edit. On this page, the current edit, with the free photos will take about 1.5Go for all the wikimedia projects. (comparig with 100Go for the entire database). We shoud think about two points now: First, you pointed out the problem related to the gfdl, well if the current edit is in free download, and some day we will use one to restore wikimedia, how legal would that be? Maybe we can list people without including al the edits... Seccond, we still nead also a system that will show us how offten the backups were made, especialy because it is not hard to do, i already did one for this little project two days ago: here

Why is it that I can't use the same user name across wiki in different languages? For those of us that are multilingual, it would be nice to be able to log in and use one username across the different wikipedia to which we contribute.

Can it be done?

Because people keep asking for it but nobody steps up to the task of writing the code necessary. -- Cyrius|✎ 01:41, 15 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Many of Wikipedia's polygon articles are simply stubs that talk about simply the polygon name and the number of sides it has, the measure of the angle in degrees, and, perhaps, a picture, and don't get updated on a regular enough basis. I propose the following:

All polygons past the

How about a counter at "User contributions" page that shows how many contributions a particular user has made. This can be useful when that user made A LOT of contributions. --SunTzu2 09:08, 11 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Yeh or even just a number next to each contribution instead of the bullet so you can easily count them. There must be some way though already, because I've seen a lot of user pages saying exactly what their 5000th edit was, or exactly how many contributions they've made... AlbinoMonkey ^(Talk) 12:39, 11 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Well for a while,

Blankfaze

18:54, 11 Jan 2005 (UTC)

The tool is currently online at [5]. Aenar 02:44, 18 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I think we'd all be better off if people stopped trying to keep score. -- Cyrius|✎ 17:39, 11 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Actually, vote count is very useful when considering

Talk

23:05, 11 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Plus, some people are just curious about how much they've done for wikipedia. SunTzu2 03:58, 16 Jan 2005 (UTC)

There is that.

Talk

16:47, 16 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I tried to find some good advice on structuring articles in wikipedia namespaces. All I found were some pages in the Style and How-to Directory, some pages in the Wikipedia:Manual of Style, and some links on template:FAPath. They mostly deal with the issue from a general stylistic and aesthetic viewpoint, and only touch on the underlying reasons for giving a logical and fairly standardized structure to encyclopedia articles.

I've therefore written up a draft guideline for writing articles in a "pyramid structure". Being mostly based on common sense, it is in part a description of what we already do, but its goal is also to explain why structuring articles in this way is good. It's at User:Zocky/Pyramid structure. Please feel free to improve and comment.

I'm not sure how to proceed. Proper structure should obviously be a FA requirement, and this should probably also be in the how-to series. But since structure is a fundamental editorial issue which heavily affects both quality and NPOV, it could also be a part of the Manual of Style. Zocky 15:54, 19 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I'd suggest also posting a notice at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style if you haven't already done so. -- Jmabel | Talk 18:55, Jan 19, 2005 (UTC)

I have spent a good amount of time during my Wikipedia career finding PNG alternatives to bad JPEG images (for example, the CIA World Factbook maps). It seems to me that the current scheme of naming images has a major flaw: namely, the inclusion of the file type as part of the file name itself. It would make it far easier to simply upload a PNG with the same name as the previous JPEG, rather than uploading a new file, indicating its copyright status, and changing image names on all the pages that use it.

Wikipedia articles don't indicate any specific file type. It would be beneficial to treat images the same way; instead of Image:St Patrick's saltire.png, for example, it would be nice to have simply Image:St Patrick's saltire. Has this been discussed before? —Bkell 07:07, 19 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Nice idea, though I'm sure it would require a software update. —Mike 07:33, Jan 19, 2005 (UTC)

Yeah, almost certainly. Should I try to bring this up at the MediaWiki site? —Bkell 07:47, 19 Jan 2005 (UTC)

it may lead to some collisions between existing images, but nothing that couldn't be sorted out. The images could then also be converted internally to jpeg or png (e.g., make all gifs into pngs, and make all images jpegs for which that results in a considerably smaller filesize), without interfering with article contents.

dab (ᛏ)

15:42, 19 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I'm not opposed to this existing, but I'm not sure how accurate it might be. I type the title I want straight into the URL and frequently use shorter redirects when I want to go to articles with long titles. Tuf-Kat 03:47, Jan 19, 2005 (UTC)

That's why it's an 'alert' and not an automated edit; it merely highlights where someone should have a look at the name. In fact, it need not be done even on a weekly basis, a review every few months should be enough to catch any titles that are grossly mis-labeled.

I seem to recall that Mediawiki can already count accesses to individual pages, but that it's explicitly turned off in the English Wikipedia because of the additional server load. —Korath (Talk) 03:59, Jan 19, 2005 (UTC)

So perhaps just some kind of Perl script or the like to check for any titles that have an unusually high re-direct count.?

Wikibuilder - a knowledge base covering the design and construction of the built environment, in its entirety, in all languages. See meta:Wikibuilder for more information, add your name to meta:Proposals for new projects#Wikibuilder if you're interested in joining, and be sure to leave your comments on meta:Talk:Wikibuilder —Christiaan - ☎ 20:28, 18 Jan 2005

Hi all, what do you think about copying the german style of this important message, compare de:MediaWiki:Sharedupload? --217.255.66.146 04:24, 20 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I like the German style better. It doesn't blend in as much as plain text does, but it is not gaudy either. —Mike 07:42, Jan 20, 2005 (UTC)

Random page is a fun feature, but it seems like a good many of them are stubs and/or very short articles. I would like to see a "random article" link, as well, that would either a) only return pages with more than one section or b) only return pages over a certain length (1000 characters seems reasonable.) Perhaps simply appending "(article)" as a separate link to the right of "Random page" could facilitate this. - Chardish 19:37, 17 Jan 2005 (UTC)

But then it wouldn't be random... Part of the beauty of the random page function is to find stub articles for an editor to expand.

ειπετε

23:13, 19 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I wasn't proposing a change in how Random Page works, but simply an additional functionality for the feature. - Chardish 03:50, 20 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Although I'm sure this idea has come up before, I was thinking how useful it might be if there were easily available "thumbs-up" and "thumbs-down" buttons on each article page. Then anonymous readers, who are often too scared or too busy to make any real edits, could at least leave their valuable opinion on the quality of an article. These statistics would not be displayed on the article, but would be available in some manner for improving the encyclopedia. For example, we might have a list of worst-rated pages, for cleanup or deletion, and a list of best-rated pages, for consideration as featured articles. It would also be a great way for editors to get more feedback from readers and to feel more appreciated. Comments for and against appreciated. Deco 05:27, 23 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I like the idea, as long as the information is only used for internal purposes. jdb ❋ 19:40, 23 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I believe something like this was already proposed. There were many oppositions, one of which was the worry that some articles would receive higher ratings than other, equally satisfactory articles. [Was about to post here, but had a conflict.] Peter O. (Talk) 19:44, Jan 23, 2005 (UTC)

This is certainly true, I would expect a considerable amount of error and anomalies in the data, but I think it would still be useful information, and I don't intend it to be a way of proving which article is better. Deco 20:26, 23 Jan 2005 (UTC)

When reviewing my watch list, I almost always want to go to the history of the article, to see who has been active and when, so I can compare to a version I have seen before. Currently this take two clicks and wait times (and system load), first to the article, then through to the history. A direct link on the "watch list" page would help. --Woodstone 00:16, 2005 Jan 23 (UTC)

You must have a different watch list that I do; mine has a link to the hist and diff of everything on the watchlist. What skin are you using? Brockert 04:33, Jan 23, 2005 (UTC)

You are absolutely right, I must be blind. It's right there, but I never saw it. Thanks for pointing it out and request withdrawn. --Woodstone 12:29, 2005 Jan 23 (UTC)

I don't mean the vandalism is automated; I mean dealing with the vandalism is automated. Currently it takes several page navigations and long waiting for each one (especially lately grumble grumble) to revert something. I think there should be a single revert button (maybe only for administrators or power users or whatever they're called?) that automatically reverts to the version before the last editor edited (to handle several tests in a row by some anon), and adds a vandalism or test template to their user talk. One click; no wait. - Omegatron 03:02, Jan 21, 2005 (UTC)

See

Wikipedia:How to revert a page to an earlier version#Admin-only "rollback" link. —Korath (Talk

) 03:24, Jan 21, 2005 (UTC)

Hmm.. I want that ability, but I don't want any responsibility.  :-) And I don't want to delete things by accident... - Omegatron 05:17, Jan 21, 2005 (UTC)

It's very difficult to outright delete things by accident. -- Cyrius|✎ 06:16, 21 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Currently, at the bottom of many articles, there is a list of categories that the article belongs in. The first link is one to the general

Practically anything would be better than linking to

Wikipedia:Category?) -Aranel

("Sarah") 01:07, 19 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I filed an enhancement request a few months ago. —AlanBarrett 08:19, 22 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I suggest putting up a couple of nonEnglish texts - novels or shortstories might be good - and inviting the public to translate them into English. Any one person need only translate a line or two. If the idea took off, we could have complete translations that could be continully improved. Of course, this could work just as well from English to other languages but that would be best done in the otherlanguage Wiki web sites.

I'd be careful with that idea. Each person may have different translations for the same text. Even now, there are many interpretions of the works of

Buddha, the Bible, and many more. I assure you there will be even MORE chaos when people try to translate it. btw, I don't think an encyclopedia is a good place for this. Try Wikibooks or Wikisource instead. SunTzu2

03:54, 16 Jan 2005 (UTC)

We can always use help at

Wikipedia:Translation into English. -- Jmabel | Talk

23:16, Jan 16, 2005 (UTC)

That is kind of what Wikisource is about. ~ mlk ^✉♬ 03:06, 21 Jan 2005 (UTC) ~

How feasible would it be to put together and publish in PDF format the various tutorials and style guides, with indices? I have a box file with piles of printouts of parts, and I am finding great difficulty in finding my round the online pages, since it is not obviouslty structured. Perhaps it is and I have not cracked it yet! It strikes me to be a successful and concientious editor one needs to absorb a great deal of knowledge about the Wikipedia culture and conventions, on top of learning how to research and write well. I certainly would welcome the means of having a paper version for studying off-line. Apwoolrich 20:10, 25 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedia has a decent print style sheet, which hides most of the navigation links and tools. If your browser supports print style sheets (if not, try Firefox), you can get good results just printing right from your web browser. On Mac OS X, click the PDF button in the print dialogue to save in PDF format (dunno what you need on Windows). Of course this doesn't give you contents or indices with page numbers, but it's easy to do right away. —Michael Z. 2005-01-22 16:54 Z

Hi all. I am thinking of starting a notice board on Hong Kong related materials. Any bright ideas or people wanting to join? Pls drop me a line on my talk page. Thanks. --JuntungWu 12:16, 25 Jan 2005 (UTC)

A user 'preference' editing option that tags wikilinks with status info.

An example of this tag might look like

This markup would be invisible to regular users, but anyone who likes to ramble around doing small edit work could set the preference to display the markup. This would open up the ability to work on a number of links on a single page by having a heads-up about the current status of all the links on that page. (Really the idea is just a further extension of the dead link color code that already exists.)

I know this would be a significant coding issue (of which I know nothing), but a general solution might be to append non-visible characters directly to the article title (or header?). This would negate any new sorting requirement on the wiki system by having the title altered each time a 'stub' or 'disambig' or 'cleanup' or similar template is added/removed from the article. Then it is just (just?) a matter for the end user's system to recognize the coding and display it.--Bookandcoffee 23:47, 24 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Or put it in the title field of the link! That is what I thought you meant when you said it. So when you hover over a link it shows you in the tooltip. - Omegatron 03:07, Jan 25, 2005 (UTC)

Hmm. Then you'd have to hover over each link to see what its status was. That might defeat the purpose? I was hoping to see it appended within an article itself, not the artcle holding the link. ie. in the above example it would be the title of the 'Stone' article that holds the template information. That way any link to 'stone' would be able to exploit the info, and any update would be universal.--Bookandcoffee 09:04, 25 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Good point. That would be mystery meat navigation. Perhaps color coding? That could get too elaborate, though. If we broke it down into just 4 colors or so, that would be viable. Nonexistent articles, regular articles, stubs, and disambigs? Putting words next to each link is kinda ugly. But maybe. - Omegatron 15:39, Jan 25, 2005 (UTC)

Mmmm. Mystery meat...

Ahh... See here: Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)#Stub_threshold. - Omegatron 15:47, Jan 25, 2005 (UTC)

Hey, thanks for the link. Once again my illusions of originality have been shattered. :) Not only has the idea been thought of - its been implimented and disgarded! I still think it has some merit, so I'll wander over to the technical thread and put my two cents in there. --Bookandcoffee 20:33, 25 Jan 2005 (UTC)

For modern browsers (i.e. not IE): :link:after {content: " (" attr(title) ")"} Anárion (talk) 15:48, 25 Jan 2005 (UTC)

hello, your website is very interesting but I want to make a possibility to remove the pictures when I don't want them.

Turn off "auto load images" in your web browser. jdb ❋ 17:31, 24 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Articles concerning people seem to be titled as "A.A.Milne". It would be better to title them "Milne,A.A" or, "Milne, Alan Alexander", or preferably "Milne, Alan Alexander (1882-1956)".

If this is desirable I would be willing to assist in renaming the current articles.

Why do you consider putting an article at a title no one would ever use to be better? -- Cyrius|✎ 14:54, 24 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Why would this be better? It isn't a library card catalog where you have to browse through by last name; it's the internet. I think the names should stay in normal order. - Omegatron 14:57, Jan 24, 2005 (UTC)

The library is orgainised by last name, normal encyclopedias also, the Who's Who is by last names as well. I would assume that there is a reason for this! Why should wikipedia be different?

Because the only way to find an entry in any of those is to browse through in alphabetical order. While this is a factor for Special:Allpages, I expect that the number of people finding an article through that is vanishingly small compared to those who search or follow a link (which would either have to be piped all the time, or have a redirect for every single entry). —Korath (Talk) 03:13, Jan 25, 2005 (UTC)

Let me break this down.

1) Is it desirable to have a policy for the naming of pages concerning people ? 2) If it is, what should this policy be ? 3) If it is, is it desirable to change the existing pages ?

No, no, no, no, no. Do you know how many thousands of pages and links there are in Wikipedia? We CAN'T change this now, even if we want to, and you still haven't presented a case for why it's needed when we have links. RickK 05:37, Jan 25, 2005 (UTC)

There is not an official policy, but the de facto policy emerging from many past discussions like this one is that names should be in the normal order (first first, last last). Deco 05:44, 25 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Why not just add redirects for all the names of people in the form Milne, A. A.? They will appear in the desired place in the list, and they will get you to the article. Nothing that exists now has to change; this just would just add the desired functionality.

Well, get to work! —Michael Z. 2005-01-22 16:54 Z

The only reason other sources use names backwards is because you have to browse through them in alphabetical order to find things. Thanks to hyperlinks, much of that sort of tedious browsing has been eliminated. Likewise with backwards names. We just link to Thomas Edison like we would if we were just speaking about him. It makes much more sense, don't you think? And for things like categories of people, they are registered in backwards, so they show up in alphabetical order. For example, Category:Deceased musicians. I see no reason for this backwards naming at all. It's a step into the past. But if you want to add a bunch of redirects that will never be used, go right ahead. We'd rather see you use your editing time for something constructive, though.  :-) - Omegatron 06:26, Jan 25, 2005 (UTC)

I would very much like to see a "hide logged-in users" feature in Special:Newpages, just like in Special:Recentchanges. Most of the vanity/advertisement/etc pages are created by anonymous users. That way it would be easier to spot them quickly. What do you think? Pt 14:46, 23 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Sounds useful to me. --

Stevietheman

21:59, 23 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Support. Deco 22:42, 23 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Ditto. jdb ❋ 00:55, 24 Jan 2005 (UTC)

This would be one of the most useful features ever. Neutrality^talk 06:31, Jan 24, 2005 (UTC)

Of course, as soon as any vandal got their head around it, they'd simply log in to reduce the likelihood of their vandalism bening noted. Filiocht 08:55, Jan 24, 2005 (UTC)

Right. And of course they don't do that now for regular edits to pages, which are already hideable this way. Anyone who cares about insidious vandals will simply leave these options off; people who prefer dealing only with egregious vandalism or newbie tests can turn them on. JRM 10:37, 2005 Jan 24 (UTC)

I have wanted this too for some time. I made a patch at [6]. If somebody else reads it/tests it and say it works then I think it will have a better chance of being applied. Thue | talk 20:09, 24 Jan 2005 (UTC)

It would also be nice to be able to mark pages as checked on special:newpages, to help yourself and other editors, like a software-assisted wikipedia:new pages patrol. I made a patch for that too: [7]. Note that you can vote for bugs in the bug tracking system :). Thue | talk 16:00, 25 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I have re-opened the debate on whether Wikipedia:About should be protected. Visit the Talk page to discuss. --Slowking Man 06:45, Jan 23, 2005 (UTC)

It's a good deal easier to track edits if the editor uses the "Edit summary" box. Wikipedia doesn't force editors to enter something in the box, which is a good idea. It could, however, do what many email clients do if you fail to enter a subject: ask the user if they really want to do that. This could gently encourage people to enter an edit summary, without the risk of forcing people to use it (in that case, people might just type jibberish). Thoughts? jdb ❋ 01:45, 22 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Hmmm... I'm bad about this myself, and it would be good for me to have a box pop up if I didn't type anything, making it more efficient to just type something. On the other hand, that is just me. Others would be annoyed. But maybe the non-annoyance of the many outweighs the non-annoyance of the lazy? Complaining is fun. - Omegatron 02:01, Jan 22, 2005 (UTC)

Support. Compare submitting a mail with no subject in Mozilla Mail. Although I hate it there, on Wikipedia an empty summary field is more often a mistake. Deco 02:14, 22 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Support as well - it could be configured that by simply clicking enter at the prompt, which also had a field for an edit summary and "cancel" - eg no mouse clicks - it went ahead and saved. This is a minor inconvenience, and I think we would rather see the person submitting the edit inconvenienced than the multitude of people throughout history from now until the end of time who will have to check their edit. To be honest, I think edit summaries should be mandatory in the main namespace.

That's one way: you could do that with a few lines of javascript. "Press OK if you really want to submit this edit without a summary, press Cancel to go back and add one." Or you could do what some web forms do -- bring the user to a new page with a giant honking exclamation point and a "are you sure you want to do that?" admonition. Given that the latter would involve a roundtrip to the (often painfully slow) wikipedia servers and the former wouldn't, I'd favor the former. jdb ❋ 02:41, 22 Jan 2005 (UTC)

A popup javascript dialog is the way to go, with a form in it so you don't have to push cancel; you can fill in the summary right then and there and push enter. It will certainly annoy me, but that is for the better good.  :-) - Omegatron 02:45, Jan 22, 2005 (UTC)

No offence, but I think this is a bad idea. Just my 2¢.

Blankfaze

03:23, 22 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Oppose. Neutrality^talk 03:24, Jan 22, 2005 (UTC)

Oppose. Nagware is bad, and tracking vandalism on RC is much easier when most vandalism is by IPs who leave no edit summary. Brockert 03:35, Jan 22, 2005 (UTC)

The proposal is not to force an edit summary, but suggest one. I doubt that vandals will stop leaving empty edit summaries even if WP reminds them to do so. The proposal may, however, make finding genuine vandals easier, by filtering out regular users who are in the habit of not entering summaries. jdb ❋ 19:45, 23 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I also oppose. Peter O. (Talk) 03:49, Jan 22, 2005 (UTC)

My 2ψ oppose: not everyone browses with javascript on, or allow it to pop up windows, and having to go through another page reload is sometimes tortuous. —Korath (Talk) 05:51, Jan 22, 2005 (UTC)

If someone doesn't have javascript on, this wouldn't have any effect -- it easily could be designed to fail gracefully. Also, there's no need for a page reload (see above) -- it could be implemented entirely in client-side javascript. jdb ❋ 19:08, 22 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Neutral. See my comments above. It would be somewhat annoying, but would make the entire experience less annoying in general. It would not be a pop-up window; just a dialog box. It would only take one click more than it currently does. It would save bandwidth as edit summaries would be more likely to be filled in and people wouldn't need to check edits by loading the page. A less forceful method would be preferred, though. - Omegatron 06:14, Jan 22, 2005 (UTC)

Oppose. This idea would slow down the "data entry flow" and I'm not sure the benefit is worth it. Perhaps a better approach would be to track what users do and automatically append a friendly informational message to their talk page if they submit so many edits w/o a summary. --

Stevietheman

07:52, 22 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I do like that idea, but it only works for logged-on users. Some combination of the nagging dialog for not-logged-in users and a nagging message on the user's talk page would be good. jdb ❋ 19:08, 22 Jan 2005 (UTC)

oppose. It will not work. I write summaries when I feel tension, or potential of disagreement. I often don't when I think my edits are totally uncontroversial. I would just switch off Javascript, or else I'd just type something like 'asdf': nonsensical edit summaries are no more helpful than no edit summaries.

dab (ᛏ)

09:14, 23 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Not to tell you how to edit, but an edit summary is more than a defense or justification. It's also informational, so people can look at the history or Recent Changes and see what changed, briefly, without interpreting a diff. An RC patroller will often interpret a missing edit summary as a potential attack ("what do they have to hide?"). Deco 10:23, 23 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I agree - edits summeries makes it possible to see what is in an edit without checking the diff. As

Wikipedia:Edit_summary says, Always fill the summary field. Thue | talk

22:31, 23 Jan 2005 (UTC)

support. As a Wiki-newbie, I have repeatedly found myself hitting "submit" and then realizing that I did not enter a summary -- even though I wanted to. The solution may be as intrusive as nagware, or as simple as placing the summary box above the wiki editing area. Allowing users to go back an add a summary to an existing change may also solve this one specific issue. --Zenkat 06:00, 24 Jan 2005 (UTC)

As a side note, has anyone considered performing controlled experiments on Wikipedia using server stats as the experimental evidence? It could be interesting to try a two-week nagware experiment that tracked the percentage of edits that included a comment, as well as other statitics about edit frequency, length, secondary alterations, etc. --Zenkat 06:00, 24 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Link spam or Comment Spam is the practice of someone putting links to their own pages in Wikis, Blogs and other places in order to raise their page's ranking in search engines by creating bogus links.

Google has devised a method to make this undesirable practice ineffective. I recommend that Wikipedia place this feature on the list of things to be implemented.

How it is done is, for external links, automatically insert rel="nofollow" in the generated html. Here is a quote from the example:

Q: How does a link change?
A: Any link that a user can create on your site automatically gets a new "nofollow" attribute. So if a blog spammer previously added a comment like
Visit my <a href="http://www.example.com/">discount pharmaceuticals</a> site.
That comment would be transformed to
Visit my <a href="http://www.example.com/" rel="nofollow">discount pharmaceuticals</a> site.

I think this will be a useful feature to make link spam not worth bothering to do or less significant.
Paul Robinson Rfc1394 18:37, 19 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Yes, it would do that, but it would also mean that we don't contribute to the Google ranks of the good articles we link to, which is just plain unfair. I think that outweighs the advantage of the proposed change. -- Jmabel | Talk 19:10, Jan 19, 2005 (UTC)

I think this is a great idea. There are is a lot of paranoia here (some of it justified, some of it not) by visitors who like to add links. If the links don't count for search engine rankings, there is no point in adding spam links. However, good links that help the article would still be added. As time went by, this community would become less paranoid about external links. As to this comment, "Yes, it would do that, but it would also mean that we don't contribute to the Google ranks of the good articles we link to, which is just plain unfair. I think that outweighs the advantage of the proposed change." Why should any site get a bump for being in Wikipedia? No one should be making money off of the efforts of the Wikipedia community. Some do but we don't have to condone it or make it easier. 141.209.33.148 21:10, 19 Jan 2005 (UTC)

It's not about "making money":

1. If we use "nofollow", Wikipedia itself will not be known to Google a "backward link" from any of these articles.
2. Presuming most links in Wikipedia are valid, and point to useful, scholarly resources, we want to boost their rankings. This is the same means by which Wikipedia itself becomes visible on Google. Our valid links help good, scholarly resources compete in the Google rankings.

Jmabel | Talk 22:10, Jan 19, 2005 (UTC)

How is it a good thing to be less paranoid about external links? Advertisements and other spam, as well as links to sites that don't contain information, should be removed regardless of whether the links are followed by search engines. Fredrik | talk 07:31, 21 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I agree with Jmabel. We're always going to have vandalism. Link spam is just another form of vandalism, and it can always be dealt with by reverting. It's not worth taking away the benefit to the quality resources (most of which are noncommercial) that are listed for good reason. – Flamurai 22:27, Jan 19, 2005 (UTC)

In addition, link spamming is not a problem we encounter every day -- it's very infrequent. Peter O. (Talk) 01:07, Jan 20, 2005 (UTC)

• Especially since the spam blacklist was added, and is maintained. I too think adding nofollow would be a bad idea. Brockert 04:20, Jan 20, 2005 (UTC)

I agree with Jmabel and others in opposition to this proposal. Link spam is infrequent and reverted in a timely manner, whereas in blogs, they usually don't have the same editing standards and Wikipedia's "watchful eyes." --

Personally, I just figure that someone trying to insert link spam here is probably not sufficiently aware of how Wikipedia works to be deterred by this. (If they were that aware of how Wikipedia works, they would know better than to try in the first place.) -Aranel ("Sarah") 17:30, 20 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I think the nofollow tags are a great idea, and should be used whenever an anonymous user adds an external link. Dealing with each vandalism manually when we have technical tools to help lessen the load is a waste of our valuable time. - Omegatron 00:47, Jan 21, 2005 (UTC)

It does sound good at first, but adding nofollow to all links is a bit like dropping out of the Web altogether. By its nature, Wikipedia's community self-moderates spam links, and this is meet and good. Gives us something to do on a slow day. —Michael Z. 08:14, 2005 Jan 21 (UTC)

• It would only be applied to external links, so it wouldn't make any difference as far as wikipedia articles coming up in google searches.
• Although wikipedia is a good source for highly relevant, quality external links, I'm sure it doesn't make a huge difference in the overall popularity of such links.
• It could be applied only to anonymous editors, making the effect negligible. - Omegatron 16:30, Jan 21, 2005 (UTC)

This has been turned on! I am very unhappy that it has, who do we need to ask to turn it back off? Brockert 02:30, Jan 22, 2005 (UTC)

Is it time to vote? - Omegatron 02:44, Jan 22, 2005 (UTC)

I hope so, though I would have thought that the time to vote was before a change in longstanding policy. -- Jmabel | Talk 03:43, Jan 22, 2005 (UTC)

As a public and appreciative wikipedia user, I heard about the change and stopped by to see how the community had handled it so quickly, given the democratic nature of wikipedia. Wow... tis is amazing that it was turned on without discussion? And with all of the negative opinions expressed? What's with that?

Since this affects every Wikipedia, the proper place for discussion is meta. I put up a page at m:Meta:nofollow, I hope you'll all go there to enhance it and express your opinion. Brockert 05:35, Jan 22, 2005 (UTC)

But it isn't that hard to spam Wikipedia if you know what you are doing. Always create a login name, only add one or two links per user name, use different IP addresses by logging in at your local public library and having subs to services like Earthlink and AOL that give you a different IP address every time, only add one or two links a day, etc. There are some successful spam sites in Wikipedia. The serious ones learn from their mistakes and figure out how to edit here and get away with it. Further, I am aware of several sites that are on the spam filter because a competitor spammed the hell out of them to get them banned from Wikipedia. They know about the spam filter and are using this method to get their competition out. The actual site owners are innocent but even legit adds from these sites are filtered out. Having a no follow tag on links will end most spamming. Most good sites don't need the help of the Wikis to rank well... 172.135.76.241 01:38, 23 Jan 2005 (UTC)