Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2018-06-29/Discussion report
Deletion, page moves, and an update to the main page
Closing Simple English Wikipedia?
A discussion is taking place on Meta on the possible closure of one of the Foundation projects. Tagged with a WMF caveat to '...keep in mind that all project closure discussions are advisory. The Language Committee and WMF Board make all final decisions on project closures', a proposal has been put forward by Piotrus this month for the closure of Simple English Wikipedia.
Simple English which has around 135,000 articles is an English-language edition of Wikipedia, primarily written in basic English and special English. Launched in 2003, its stated aim is to provide an encyclopedia for "people with different needs, such as students, children, adults with learning difficulties, and people who are trying to learn English".
Among the 118 editors who have chimed in so far, are several well known Wikipedians who are on opposite sides of the fence - speakers in defence of SE include
At 64 (against) vs 54 (for), the discussion is still fairly evenly balanced. Comments are thought provoking.
Jimbo gets reverted in move discussion
At the time of the Royal Wedding,
Promising drafts
On
Deleting InternetArchiveBot's posts
InternetArchiveBot is a bot which replaces dead links with working ones from the Wayback Machine (a site owned by the Internet Archive). Originally, after editing a link, it would post a message on the relevant article's talk page (see here for an example). However, in February, this functionality was disabled as the result of an RfC due to the bot being more accurate and the false positive reporting system being simplified. This RfC asks whether these deprecated posts should be deleted from talk pages, either manually or with a bot. Consensus seems to be against this proposal.
Main page design refresh
Proposed icon refresh
Wikipedia's icons have not changed in a long time, and some users consider them outdated, leading to one user proposing on the village pump that icons be adopted from icon sets such as OOjs, Emoji One, and Google Material Design. Users are divided as to the suggested icons' quality.
Mailing list
- French law prohibits listing people based on their religion, such as with Category:French Jews, and there is no such category on the French Wikipedia. This led one user to raise a concern on Wikimedia-l as to what should be done in response to English Wikipedia's apparent violation of French law. The consensus was that compliance was not needed due to EnWP servers not being based in France.
- Another mailing list topic, entitled "Are we losing out to bad editing?" seeks solutions to Wikipedia's ongoing admin decline (It's really bad) and what that means for the fight against vandals, PoV pushers, and paid advocacy editors.
Follow-ups
- The Event Coordinator (EVC) group written about in the last issue has been implemented. Users interested in running events can apply for the permission at WP:RFP/EVC.
- The proposed changes to WP:Drafts#Miscellany for deletion were approved and added. The following text was added to the section: "A draft that has been repeatedly resubmitted and declined at AfC without any substantial improvement may be deleted at MfD if consensus determines that it is unlikely to ever meet the requirements for mainspace and it otherwise meets one of the reasons for deletion outlined in the deletion policy."
To suggest a discussion for inclusion in the next installment of the Discussion Report, leave a comment below or on the
Discuss this story
Nice to see something I started get a mention here, but it seems that the author of this article (and User:Kudpung) are missing a major point by assuming this doesn't concern EN WP much. Cost is a very minor issue, infusion of volunteers would be nice if hardly game changing, but a significant part of the discussion concerns ideas such as a possible merge of the simple content to EN WP, possibly through establishing of a new namespace and a new tab next to the read one. This is something EN WP should be more interested in (through of course nothing would change without a separate, dedicated RfC on EN WP). Also, the report misses explaining why I proposed to close SWP (i.e. the argument that it is not reaching the vast majority of its audience, who are unaware of this niche, hidden project; hence the argument for merge, so that the content can be more easily accessed by those who need it - the young, ESLs, special needs, etc.). I know that journalists are good at missing the forest for a tree, but this is a wiki, I am available for comment too :> --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 03:17, 30 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]