Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Persistent proposals/Archive 4

My first suggestion was for a 'Childrens Version' but there would be obvious difficulties in deciding the age / level at which to aim the abbreviated version.
My amended suggestion is that there should be a one-page (or two-page maximum) version for as many articles as possible. The quality and variety of the million+ wikipedia articles is phenomenal but often there is a need for a brief version. This is particularly true when homework is being done or when an overview is required.
What do other people think?? Nojoking (talk) 16:52, 4 October 2011 (UTC)

We do have the Simple English Wikipedia. — Edokter (talk) — 16:59, 4 October 2011 (UTC)

Simple English Wikipedia is suitable for adults who have English as a second language, A children's Wikipedia if one were created would have articles which are consistent with a primary/middle school level of education. It would be designed to compliment the education a typical child (Age 5-12) should have and be a valuable aid for homework assignments. Washuchan (talk) 13:31, 4 February 2012 (UTC)

I am a college educated adult and I struggle with the highly technical level of many articles. The Simple English version is too basic. I would suggest creating a version or options within pages that allow for newspaper level English (not sure of what that age level or term is called) language. So many articles are only understandable to others who specialize in that topic, defeating the purpose of having Wikipedia accessible to the average user. I often want to know more about a topic in depth but do not understand all the scientific or technical language. Does anyone else agree? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Silverlockschic (talk • contribs) 16:28, 11 April 2013 (UTC)

Wikipedia articles are supposed to be understandable by anybody: see

WP:AUDIENCE. There are various templates such as Template:Technical and Template:Context that can be used to mark articles that fail to be comprehensible for non-experts. It may seem a good idea to create another, less technical Wikipedia, but if people can't or don't improve articles here, it's unlikely they'll create a whole new Wikipedia of more comprehensible articles. --Colapeninsula (talk

) 10:08, 15 April 2013 (UTC)

I haven't realized (until now) that Simple English Wikipedia can be looked at like a children or a less technical version of English Wikipedia. I was just thinking that it's for people who don't understand English very well. If this is the case, then the link to the Simple English Wikipedia article should be somewhere on the top, more visible, so the readers will know they can read an easier version of articles. For example the DNA article should have the link to simple:DNA somewhere near the disambiguation notes, with a text like this "Click here to see a less-technical article about DNA". Or maybe someone can create a gadget to show the link of simple:DNA at the top of the DNA article (and for all the other articles), making the readers understand that they can read a children version of articles. Anyway, in this case, only the English Wikipedia has a children's version, and other languages don't have it.

Another possible implementation is to create another namespace (like for example UnTechnical:DNA), and the page can be accessed between the article and it's talk page links. This namespace will be like an "extra" talk page if you want, and therefore it won't be needed to have it's own talk pages.

Another option is to create, for those articles that qualify, an article with the same name but with a prefix like "_simple". For example the DNA_simple article, also advertised at the top of the DNA article - either after the disambiguation note, or it can be (smartly) linked between article and it's talk page. Might be easier to implement since it doesn't imply the creation of a new namespace, which might need serious modifications in the MediaWiki sources. —  Ark25  (talk) 07:58, 7 September 2013 (UTC)

Or it can be a subpage like: DNA/Simple. This way it will be easy to implement "Did You Know" sections too: DNA/DYK, or various other points of view. —  Ark25  (talk) 08:32, 7 September 2013 (UTC)

Childrens' Wikipedia should not exist. Already existing articles should be made to explain stuff more clearly. Perhaps they could be expanded to explain what some of the terms that most children don't understand are. If that makes the article cumbersomely long for readers who don't want to see all those explanations they already know, then those terms that childern don't understand should insted give a link to an article that explains them. 5 year olds aren't even interested in reading Wikipedia anyway. It's not Wikipedia's job to add a childrens' version. It's the teachers' job not to assign homework for children of searching Wikipedia articles about a topic that's too hard for them. Children won't stay children for ever. They will get a chance later on of being smarter and able to understand Wikipedia articles more easily. There's no need to create a childrens' wikipedia just to have the freedom to lie to kids in an article to make it easier to understand, for example lying to kids that phisical objects follow Newton's laws when they really follow Einstein's laws. Children could instead be told in a regular Wikipedia article that except for really high speeds, physical objects are so close to following Newton's laws that no observations of low level experiments on Earth are ever affected by not following Newton's laws. Blackbombchu (talk) 00:50, 13 November 2013 (UTC)

...Why would a child-level Wikipedia be set up to lie? (Not that I really support this proposal when it comes up.) - Purplewowies (talk) 04:13, 8 January 2014 (UTC)

I'm archiving this. There was never any real interest in this idea. Oiyarbepsy (talk) 08:59, 21 December 2014 (UTC)

Linkrot of online sources is a problem for all articles on Wikipedia. I think, it is especially serious, if it affects featured articles, as this damages the hard work that has gone into an article that actually becomes featured. Therefore I propose when an article gets promoted to FA status, all online sources should be archived as part of the FA process, using a system such as

• Support Agree completely.
  talk · contribs · email
  ) 16:24, 5 August 2011 (UTC)

Understand that these archive sites will honor web site settings that don't allow archiving; the New York Times is one such site. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 16:37, 5 August 2011 (UTC)

Anything would be better than the current system. Ideally Wikipedia itself would archive all sources irrespective of any no-spider tagging, but that's not practical here. Providing archive.org links at the very least would help with a good 50% or more of sources. Keep in mind that paywalls aside, major institutions like the New York Times are not likely to be inaccessible or disappear forever. Other websites are far more likely to poof. HominidMachinae (talk) 02:57, 6 August 2011 (UTC)

If this goes through, we should respect individual websites' noindex / noarchive settings (especially when archiving is already something you have to opt out of). Building an encyclopaedia does not trump copyright or respect for content owners' wishes. wctaiwan (talk) 14:22, 6 August 2011 (UTC)

Why should other spider operators respect our noindex settings if we don't respect theirs? Happy‑melon 11:00, 7 August 2011 (UTC)

• Support - Our featured content is our most valuable content, but it is only as good as the references that support it. When the references go dead, the content is in question so it makes sense to archive as much as we possibly can. I believe
  WP:Checklinks is helpful with this, but a fully automated process would be much better. Automating the archiving of references would not only be helpful for our featured content, but all of our other content as well. - Hydroxonium (T•C•V
  ) 03:05, 6 August 2011 (UTC)
• Support - if it's technically feasible then it's a very good idea.Volunteer Marek (talk) 05:05, 6 August 2011 (UTC)
• Support Who is making this happen? We can support all we want, but if someone isn't doing the job, then this goes nowhere. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 11:25, 6 August 2011 (UTC)

I agree and I guess this is kind of a problem. If we reach a consensus here to do this, I know a person I could ask to bring this to the foundations attention. And if the foundation chooses to ignore this and instead continues to rule stuff out that is (in my opinion) much less useful than this would be (just mentioning these rectangular boxes at the bottom of articles) then I think something goes awfully wrong here. Just my other 2¢. Toshio Yamaguchi (talk) 15:50, 6 August 2011 (UTC)

• Why just FAs? Why not every article? Why not just encourage (not require) all links to be archived using WebCite when added as refs? /ƒETCHCOMMS/ 17:50, 6 August 2011 (UTC)

The reason for this is, because tons of previous discussion regarding this issue led virtually nowhere. I think this more specific proposal might have better chances to actually gain consensus and reach the stage of an implementable solution. If this is successful, I see no problem with expanding this to other articles as well. Again, even after tons of previous discussions, only very little has been achieved. Therefore I am happy if we can achieve anything in that area. This does in no way imply that I am not open to expanding this to every article in the future, but we have to start small in my opinion. Toshio Yamaguchi (talk) 18:06, 6 August 2011 (UTC)

• Support, but for any and all cited references (if they already aren't using the |archiveurl= and |archivedate= parameters). This could be accomplished by a bot or two (it would take some catching up, for sure, but it could be done). ···
  Join WikiProject Japan
  ! 17:58, 6 August 2011 (UTC)
• Strong Support. I've long considered link-rot of sources to be Wikipedia's most pressing problem that's not getting the urgent attention it deserves. User:WebCiteBOT was my last hope as everything was going so good but the project keeps stalling. I'm really hoping the Archive-It.org/Wikimedia partnership proposal thing below goes through.. -- œ^™ 10:33, 7 August 2011 (UTC)
• Strong Support Well, that's a good idea! Pesky (talk …stalk!) 09:43, 9 August 2011 (UTC)
• Support This is just so very yes.
  Wha?
  04:45, 10 August 2011 (UTC)
• Question - Is the support we have so far enough to move this forward? - Hydroxonium (T•C•V) 05:01, 17 August 2011 (UTC)

Archive-It.org

I think that it would be appropriate for MediaWiki to join the Internet Archive as an Archive-It partner. This would cover all of the MediaWiki projects including all of the language-specific Wikipedias and Wiktionary, among others. --User:Ceyockey (talk to me) 14:59, 6 August 2011 (UTC)

Rather, "Wikimedia Foundation", not "MediaWiki". --User:Ceyockey (talk to me) 15:01, 6 August 2011 (UTC)

I believe this is already being investigated, among other possibilities. --Cybercobra (talk) 01:04, 7 August 2011 (UTC)

Yep, it's Kevin's ArchiveLinks project overseen by the WMF and mentioned on their tech blog. - Hydroxonium (T•C•V) 21:20, 7 August 2011 (UTC)

Resurrected from archives

This proposal had 100% support but not much participation. I've resurrected it in hopes that it will move forward. All comments are welcome. - Hydroxonium (T•C•V) 05:05, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

• I fully support it, I think everyone does, but there's the matter of how it works. I would wish it upon no person that they be forced to do manual archiving--that's a dreadfully monotonous task that, if it can't be done automatically, should be done by the primary authors--especially as depending on the article, it's not as simple as adding the archiveurl field (Harvard citations and all that.) Der Wohltemperierte Fuchs^(talk) 13:54, 24 October 2011 (UTC)

Agreed, manually archiving links is not fun. There are some automated tools for archiving though. I believe

WP:Checklinks and tools:~betacommand/webcite.html make the process mostly painless. - Hydroxonium (T•C•V

) 05:10, 25 October 2011 (UTC)

• Question - If the archival of references is deemed to be essential for a Featured Article, then why would it not be made part of the FA criteria obligating the editors to do the archival work as part of bringing an article up to FA status? -- Whpq (talk) 14:58, 3 November 2011 (UTC)

Support - there must be a way of ensuring that references are not lost. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Wer900 (talk • contribs) 23:13, 6 March 2012 (UTC)

• Support, no-brainer. Interchangeable 22:31, 4 April 2012 (UTC)
• The French Wikipedia has used an external auto-archival service for their reference links for years, if I understand correctly. Might be a good idea to ask around whether the same system could be used here. Jafeluv (talk) 10:45, 27 August 2012 (UTC)
• Support. This would help Featured Articles gain more credibility among the general public. Andrew³²⁷ 20:05, 27 August 2013 (UTC)

Implementation

I took this to Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 132#Automatically archiving reference links when pages are promoted to features article Wikipedia talk:Featured article candidates/archive62#Automatically archiving reference links when pages are promoted to features article for implementation. Oiyarbepsy (talk) 15:36, 11 December 2014 (UTC)

Also, if I don't see interest there, I will close and archive this discussion. Oiyarbepsy (talk) 08:57, 21 December 2014 (UTC)