Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2009-03-02/Discussion report

Discussion Reports And Miscellaneous Articulations

The following is a brief overview of new discussions taking place on and about the English Wikipedia and major discussions on its sister projects. For older, yet possibly active, discussions please see last week's edition.

Surveys

• Wikipedia Attribution Survey

The Wikimedia Foundation has opened a survey among active English Wikipedia contributors regarding authorship credit. It is meant to inform discussions about potential clarifications of the terms of service and licensing model used by Wikimedia projects. The survey was advertised via a CentralNotice starting on 27 February. Questions are on topics regarding activities as a Wikipedia contributor; they range from I edit existing articles to I am involved in the organization, a chapter, or the Wikimedia movement. There is also a section asking which of a handful of models for giving credit to article authors are considered appropriate for Wikipedia text, asking that they be ranked in order from 1 to 6. The CentralNotice was disabled on 1 March 2009. A similar survey was opened for the German Wikipedia on 4 March.

Centralized discussions

• Labelling of "Build the web"

There is currently a discussion ongoing regarding how

former guideline|Wikipedia:Manual of Style (links)}}, {{guideline}}, or no template. This most recent discussion regarding WP:BUILD is the result of a merge

from 11 January.

Ryan Postlethwaite, the clerk for the date linking arbitration case, has opened a draft RfC and is requesting community input. The page states:

It is important that to get as many views as possible on the format of a request for comment regarding date linking articles, we get individual views about the process.

Some questions he hopes contributors will address are: what issues the RfC should deal with, what format the RfC should take, and how each individual point should be put across. After the community has decided what form the RfC should take it will be listed in order to obtain a project-wide consensus.

• Straw poll on giving bureaucrats the technical ability to desysop users

Also see last week's coverage.

A

administrator status of user accounts, something that only stewards

can do currently. The straw poll currently shows a clear lack of consensus, with 51 editors supporting the proposal and 26 opposing it. Nine editors also noted concern that the poll is premature, and that they believe that more discussion needs to take place.

• Bot request for approval for bot NNBot II

A bot request for approval was initiated by

Nn123645

on 26 February. The request states the bot would:

1. Fix the removal of the speedy deletion template by the creator of the page as specified in policy while remaining 1RR complient so as not to edit war. In the event that the article creator removes the template again notify both the article creator and the person who placed the tag on the article.
2. For users who repeatedly remove speedy deletion templates warn them with the
   Suspected Copyright Violations
   of all articles that have had the speedy deletion template removed by the creator to allow administrators and other users to easily check up on which articles have had the speedy deletion tag removed by the creator.

There is overall support for points 1 and 2; while point 3 is currently under scrutiny.

Proposals

• Proposal regarding giving Bot Approvals Group members the technical ability to grant and revoke the 'bot' flag

Also see last week's coverage.

There is currently a proposal to give Members of the Bot Approvals Group the ability to grant and remove the "bot" flag from accounts. The flag, which can currently only be removed and applied by

bureaucrats, flags all edits made by the flagged account as "bot" edits. Bot edits are not shown in the recent changes feed by default, and can be removed from watch lists. Bots that edit more than a few times per minute require this flag to avoid clogging Special:RecentChanges

. The proposal is almost unanimously opposed—many editors feel that the current system provides essential oversight of the bot approvals process.

• Deletion of images tagged with {{GFDL-presumed}}

It has been proposed to tag and delete all 469 images which are currently tagged with {{

nld}}, with a specifically written message put on the User's talk page. The message would describe the issue and tell them to re-upload the image if they missed the grace period and their image was deleted. While there is general support, it was mentioned that between 19 September 2004 and 18 May 2005 MediaWiki:Uploadtext

stated:

By uploading a file here to which you hold the copyright, you agree to licence it under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.

A proposal to hand-check certain entries based off of set criteria has met general support.

Following

Criteria for speedy deletion

to include a G13 criterion for the new books feature. The proposed amendment states it would include:

any book whose contents would be subject to speedy deletion as an article.

Currently the proposal has been met with minimal discussion. Following this proposal a

second proposal was created to give Wikipedia:Books their own criteria section. A WikiProject Wikipedia Books

has been proposed to the WikiProject Council which should help keep the amount of vandalism through books down.

• Proposal to disable book creation from Special:Book in project space

Following

a discussion at the Administrators' noticeboard it has been proposed to disable the ability to create books in the project space via Special:Book in an effort to reduce test pages and vandalism. Due to arguments against this move it was proposed to create a new namespace specifically for books. This proposition has been met with general support. It has also been proposed to modify {{saved book

}} to allow the use of a |confirmed= parameter. This parameter would categorize books after they had been reviewed. This proposition has also been met with general approval.

• Wikimedia Commons Rollback Policy

Users at the Wikimedia Commons are currently discussing a proposal to enable the

rollback feature

. The current proposal states that the feature would be granted automatically if the user met certain specifications, and the right could also be granted under administrator discretion if the user did not meet the autopromotion criteria. Current discussion has revolved around automatically enabling rollback for users. Opponents specifically state that if the right is granted automatically that it cannot be removed, and that the right should be revocable.

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In this issue

2 March 2009

Books extension

News and notes

In the news

Dispatches

WikiProject report

Discussion report

Features and admins

Technology report

Arbitration report

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Wikipedia Attribution Survey dates

So this edition of Signpost is dated 2nd March and gives notice of a discusion to take place that "will be disabled on 1 March 2009" - bit late now isn't it ? David Ruben ^Talk 23:48, 2 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

You're going to be so embarrassed when you go back and look at the words that precede your quoted text. ;) - BanyanTree 03:36, 3 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

The central notice was disabled. The survey is still active.--ragesoss (talk) 04:14, 3 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Hehe, Thanks for the chuckle. §hep^Talk 04:17, 3 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Ok ok, so the survey is still active (but not the impression given with the final comment about something now being closed). However then the comment about the CentralNotice (vs the survey itself) is definitely wrong: 3rd sentence "The survey is currently being advertised via a CentralNotice" yet the last sentence refutes the "is currently" with "The CentralNotice was disabled on 1 March 2009". That 3rd sentence should read "The survey was advertised until 1 March 2009 via a CentralNotice" and the final one dropped :-) David Ruben ^Talk 00:21, 4 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Ya, I forgot to update that part. My chuckle wasn't at you though, reading it again that looked mean. I was scared to death that I had put something completely wrong for who knows how many people to read. I'll try to fix it up. Thanks for the help, §hep^Talk 21:52, 4 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]