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Proposal to extend Recent Changes flags

Okay, at the moment RC displays the m and N flags for "minor edit" and "new page", respectively. Currently, the only other method of edit assessment on the RC page is the username and edit summary, both of which are of limited use, especially in the case of vandalism. This is a proposal for additional RC flags that would decrease vandalism response time and make things easier for RC junkies and admin.

Proposed flags and issues

Note that these flags use a (totally unofficial and made-up) standard, wherein lowercase is used for flags related to the edit, whereas uppercase is used for flags related to the article itself.

• "+" - Significant addition. Edits that add over a certain amount of characters would trip this flag. Typically this would total a couple of sentences of editing.
• "-" - Significant removal. Opposite of above. Not triggered if "blanked" (below) is triggered.
  • Possibly "--" and "++" for large addition/removal (for lack of a more original name) These would be triggered by the addition or removal of a couple paragraphs of text. This may just be bloat, however.
• "B" - Blanked. Triggered if all text has been removed from a article.
  • Is this letter already used for bots? An alternative is "W" for whited out or wiped.
• "R" - Revert. Triggered if edit matches a previous version of the article.
  • This would require the calculation and storage of the md5sum for every version of a page.
• "u" - Unwikied text. Triggered if a significant amount of unwikied text is added.
  • The value of "significant amount" could result in improper flagging of minor edits if too low, and miss unwikied stubs if too high. Perhaps should be calculated as a percentage of article size.
• "C" - Contentious. Triggered by an edit to an article that is {{disputed}} or has received over a certain number of edits in a given amount of time.
  • The former system for detecting contentious articles might flag non-contentious articles with factual problems, whereas the latter might flag rapidly-growing articles.
• "D" - Recently deleted article. This would trigger upon recreation of a previously (recently) deleted article.
• "p" - Profanity (or "t" for Trigger). This flag would be triggered if an edit contained any profane or trollish words, as specified in a protected list of trigger words.
  • This would yield a high level of false positives, especially on innocuous articles about reproduction or similar. For this reason, it may be of limited use.
• "E" - Highly exposed article. Used for articles directly linked to by the front page, or having received a certain amount of hits in a period of time (this should make waves of vandalism immediately following linking in news articles, blogs or on the front page more difficult).

There is further potential for flagging edits to pages containing certain templates. These might include stubs/sectstubs/substubs, cleanup pages, disambigs, etc. There is a huge potential for bloat in that idea, but it may also prove useful for quickly isolating articles that might need work.

Another possibility is a flag for edits by known contentious users, such as those who have been warned for editwars, as one step below temporary banning. However, this may be a bad idea because it overpublicises disputse of that nature. A similar (and just as possibly bad) idea is flagging edits by new users.

Positives

• Makes vandalism/junk detection easier (Nu = new article full of unwikied text, for example)
• Changes edit information from user-reliant to program-reliant (m and edit summary rely on the benevolence of the author)

Negatives

• Additional resource use for calculation and storage of data (such as md5sums)
• Letters have little intrinsic meaning and are not understandable by new users (requiring added external documentation)
  • Maybe using the <acronym> tag would help. [ alerante | “” 14:07, 26 Nov 2004 (UTC) ]
• Added clutter to recent changes
• Breaks the enhanced recent changes page (which currently aligns flags on the left)
• Not internationalised (what's the first letter of "Revert" in Mandarin?)
• Vandals will turn to more sneaky vandalism once they know the simple vandalism is traced automatically

Implementation

Solutions to the lack of intrinsic meaning are generally centered around mouse-over explanatory text. Either the <acronym> tag, or a simple link to a page like Wikipedia:Recent changes flags with a title attribute describing the tags in question.

Through surveys on this page and on the #wikipedia IRC channel, it appears that some users are in favour of coloured flags, while others completely detest the idea. Accordingly, if used, this should be a configuration option, defaulting to non-coloured.

Regarding the particular flags and number of flags used, most users seem to be in assent with the general idea and flags, while some feel that the flags may prove to be too numerous. Most people seem in favour of a trial run, in which all the above suggested flags are implemented, with these removed if needed.

Any comments/suggestions/criticisms etc are welcome. CXI 15:23, 29 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Comments

Some questions: Would these have to be manually selected by the editor? If not, how would they work? If so, of what value are they? How do you define 'significant'? Filiocht 09:23, Nov 12, 2004 (UTC)

No, Filiocht, as it says above, these would be automatically generated. 'significant' would be decided during the process of setting up the feature(or it could probably be changed later(it might even be able to be a pref, like the stub feature)) JesseW 09:38, 12 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Would you see the minor tag becoming automated? Filiocht 09:49, Nov 12, 2004 (UTC)

I wouldn't - what simple algorthm is there for "formatting changes"? ;-) JesseW 10:55, 12 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Sigh. I had a nice long, involved response. And I lost it all in broswer crash. Damm. Well, I'll just say it's a great idea, I strongly encourage you to do it, and all that. Damm. Damm. Damm. JesseW 09:38, 12 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I would like to see all of these that don't require too much of a load on the server (R sounds a little risky, for example). Ashiibaka tlk 05:39, 14 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Would someone format each of these ideas as a Mediazilla feature request and enter them in? Please post here after you do it. JesseW 04:23, 16 Nov 2004 (UTC)

By each of these do you mean each flag? CXI 07:28, 16 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I like this idea. A lot. Some of them would be tricky to implement, but some (such as B) we should have had a long time ago! -- Chuq 23:55, 17 Nov 2004 (UTC)

If the overhead is low enough, sounds like a great idea. Paul August 03:54, Nov 18, 2004 (UTC)

I like it too -- submit it to Mediazilla! [[User:CatherineMunro|Catherine\^talk]] 10:10, 18 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Would anyone mind giving comments on individual flags? I'm particularly curious about whether anyone has any suggestions or additions, or considers the flags perhaps too numerous. What about the two possibly-bad-idea flags? I have some more ideas for flags, such as 'r' for consecutive edits to a page by one contributor, but I'm worried that polluting the namespace too much will erode the usefulness of the whole idea.

I'm also not sure what to propose regarding the the non-intrinsicness of the flags. Ideally, a key might work, but isn't terribly extensible. Perhaps links for each flag letter, with a mouse-over text containing a description of each. Should they be coloured or not? Grey for unwikied, red for contentious... might be nice, or might look really ugly and be a waste of time. The thought of pretty icons for each flag also springs to mind, except for the effort involved, the loading time, and the general uselessness.

Oh, for the record, the p and E flags were added just before I wrote this. Thus, previous endorsements of the flag system would not include those two. CXI 14:54, 18 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I've been considering this one for a couple of days. I fear that the flags might be too numerous, but I can't think of alternatives; color-coding entries on RC would be garish (and not accessible for some), although it might be useful in combination with flags, for high-probability vandalism like blanking.

I've come to the conclusion it would probably be better to go forward with all of the flags for a test period, and then get feedback from users (especially the Wikipedia:RC patrol) on what is useful and what is clutter. At the very least, I think "+", "-", "B", and "U", and possibly "E", should be/would be retained. I share your concerns about "R" and "C" fueling edit wars -- it basically takes those battles currently fueled by watchlists into everyone's turf. Whether this would turn wars into conflagrations, or bring cooler heads in to moderate, is up for debate, and experimentation, I guess.

"P" seems very useful to me, although I've been trying to think of a word other than "profanity" for it; it's not profanity we're worried about per se, it's the "words commonly abused by vandals". Whatever we call it, I think everyone who has spent any time patrolling RC would agree that it would help highlight the common stupidities (nazi, gay, 0WNZ0RED, etc.), and that it would be easy to learn when it produces false positives. It would also be useful if the diff could somehow highlight the word(s) that tripped the flag, for ease of evaluation. Also nice if users/admins can add words to the "flag" list; perhaps admins could be given the right to remove words from it -- this would allow words to be set temporarily, to deal with spam-vandals, by highlighting edits with a certain non-"profane" words or links, until they get bored.

I can't find it in Mediazilla, but I've heard this request before -- a flag that patrollers can set on an article to say it's already been checked. This alone would save huge amounts of time, if we don't have efforts duplicated quintuply or more. The problem is in who you trust to set the flag.... Anyway, those are my thoughts, hope it helps. Good idea! [[User:CatherineMunro|Catherine\^talk]] 05:25, 26 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Perhaps coloured flags could be a configuration option. I'm sure some art-capable person would be able to make them look at least slightly nice. About the edit warring thing, I'm also reserved. I think a fundamental wiki assumption is that most people are mostly good, so from that premise I'd hypothesise that more people looking in on an edit war would shorten its lifespan rather than lengthen it. Whether that actually turns out to be the case is anyone's guess, I suppose.

Good point about the profanity flag. I can't think of anything short of "b" for "bad word" or "t" for possible trolling. Neither of those are particularly good, so maybe we could pretend that it's an old designation that couldn't be changed for compatibility. Perhaps the words could be taken from a protected article like Wikipedia:List of Abuse Trigger Words.

That last idea is a particularly good one, though I don't know if it sits with this particular proposal, which is more in the line of automated flags rather than author or viewer set ones. Regardless, I'd be in favour of a "I've checked this edit and it's okay" option, and an equivalent "someone needs to have a look at this" option, which could also be settable during the edit. Maybe those could be displayed in tally form. CXI 15:37, 26 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Yes, the "I've checked this" flag should not be submitted to the developers as part of this proposal, as it would require different functionality, but if submitted separately each proposal should reference the other.

I don't think "++" or "--" would be necessary; I think it would be better to stick to single-character codes, in any case. On the other, maybe "A" for abuse, or "T" for "trouble" or "trigger"...actually, I think I'm kind of partial to "trigger" -- simple to remember, not judgemental like "troll" or "vandal", broader than "profanity". The use of a protected page for it is good too. [[User:CatherineMunro|Catherine\^talk]] 18:18, 26 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Thanks, everyone. I've archived this to a user subpage and submitted it to MediaZilla as bug 958. CXI 16:21, 29 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I want My Word back

I miss the bbc radio broadcast of "MY WORD" are there any sites which still audio stream the program? Are there any radio re-plays in the U.S. (via NPR)? Where can I download or buy editions?

reverend_logan@yahoo.com

Retrieved from "http://en.wiki.x.io/wiki/Talk:My_Word%21"

Wikiproverb

I really want to have a postal like wikipedia or wikiquote, which is on proverbs and idioms and some useful phrases or phrasal verbs. That would be very helpful for people to learn to write and express their thoughts better. I do believe that this kind of tools are lack of in the market. In light of the success of wikipedia, I hope people will think about this idea.

Proverbs already appear in Wikipedia, Wiktionary and Wikiquote so I don't think there is a need to create another project for them. Deciding which of these three projects ought to have them and whether the triplication is necessary might be a better idea. See, for example, Wiktionary:English proverbs, Wikiquote:English proverbs, and List of English proverbs. Angela. 00:29, Nov 8, 2004 (UTC)

wikipuliki

On the page too much wiki-stress, Solipsist posted the following suggestion: ...I wonder whether there is a general solution. Rather than all the slightly negative 'Requests for Comment' and the like (which seldom seems to get anywhere), perhaps we need a page where people can say 'I'm feeling too stressed/under seige' in order to illicit positive support (group hug) from others who appreciate their contributions.
Now i think this is a rather cool concept so i combined the hawaiian word for hug with wiki and got wikipuliki. Does anyone else think (esp considering that several high profile users have recently quit, due at least in part to wikistress) that a page whos sole purpose is to give group hugs and other positive type things would be a good idea? The bellman 08:44, 2004 Oct 26 (UTC) Update: i just discovered Wikipedia:Department_of_Fun, which is in a similar vain as my proposal. The bellman 09:32, 2004 Oct 30 (UTC)

comments: What can I Say , great idea —siroχo 10:10, Oct 26, 2004 (UTC)

Only tempts me if it becomes a way to get people to actually come help with the problems causing the stress. See, for example, my recent posting Wikipedia:Village_pump_(miscellaneous)#Israel.2FPalestine, to which I've had no response in the over 36 hours since I posted it. -- Jmabel | Talk 23:42, Oct 26, 2004 (UTC)

Wasn't there a band in the 80s called Wikipuliki. -- Solipsist 08:33, 10 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Auto RSS Feeds

Hi,

it would be a good feature if you could just mark RSS in the way that browser can autorecognize their existence and offer users to subscribe.

Currently this feature is supported by Mozilla Firefox (http://www.getfirefox.com), and it allows easy subscription by showing orange RSS in status bar. I guess that you should add this mark to your news page.

This is example of the HTML code that marks RSS for browsers:

<LINK rel="alternate" TYPE="application/rss+xml" TITLE="B92 RSS" HREF="http://www.b92.net/news/rss/rss.php">

so please include it, it would be a nice feature (and it is easy to add it).

Best regards,

Ashley

WTF? Wikipedia doesn't use RSS. Being one of the more influential members at SFX (at least I like to think so), I recognized exactly what you're doing, I read it in RSS campaign: ask sites to add auto-detection. This site however doesn't have RSS, so I just don't get it. --Me at work 21:23, 21 Oct 2004 (UTC) (yes its me)

Actually, we do have both RSS and Atom feeds available for certain utility pages - e.g. Special:RecentChanges. However, as pointed out at Bugzilla:721, the software does in fact have <link>s to these already. However, it seems what was really being asked was whether bots could be created to parse certain "news"/"announcements" pages, and then have this kind of link manually added to the page to point at them. I think. So I guess we're all a bit confused. - IMSoP 21:40, 28 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I would like to add another point of view... It would be nice to be able to have RSS feed for all articles. If not for individuals that could be useful to create a distibution net for non-wiki satelite sites, that may be a way to produce controled redundancy, and easy the load on wikipedia. And/or may be the way to let a site that run Mediawiki software update articles in it´s database from wikipedia. Maybe create a new kind of page that could be only be updated from wikipedia. Or could be updated from any system running MediaWiki software. This could create a net of distribution of articles with some very interesting possibilities. Just some thoughts on the subject...

best regards,

Svasti 19:43, 12 Nov 2004

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Do we have feeds for anything but Recent Changes? I think there should be one for Featured Articles. Chameleon 16:50, 13 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I second the idea that an RSS feed for Featured Articles would be a good idea. Beyond Recent Changes, more technical feeds for the community could include all the standard Cleanup/Attention/etc type feeds. That might make it easier to get help where it's needed. --thames 21:41, 18 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I personally hold an extreme dislike for RSS. I find it chaotic, confusing, and unhelpful. I've never understood the hype.

Common Images

I sugges a language wikipedia (i.e. spanish) can use the images stored in another one (i.e. the english Wikipedia).

This is very important to spare space and use common images.

I suggest use in the spanish wikipedia [[En:Image:ImageName]] to display an image from the english Wikipedia.

Hopefully soon it will be possible to use images from http://commons.wiki.x.io, which will then be the prime place for free images which are not language-dependend - so you are not the first one who suggested that one, commons has been in discussion for more than 6 months already and is online, but not yet usable from the wikipedias. The reason why it isn't possible to refer to images from any other language wikipedia is the fact that it should be possible to download a complete language edition without the need to crawl through many other wikis to have the images needed. andy 12:43, 3 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I have nearly two hundred of my own photographs (all GFDL) that I would like to move or copy from the English Wikipedia to the Commons. Is there a fast way to do this? Fg2 02:14, Nov 14, 2004 (UTC)

Not yet. – Quadell ^{(talk) (help)}[[]] 19:39, Nov 16, 2004 (UTC)

Wikipedia toolbar

I was wondering if a IE/FF based wikipedia toolbar exists. vogon77 05:07, Sep 27, 2004 (UTC)

I suggested this once before, to no response. Hopefully this proposal gets more hearsay. -- user:zanimum

I was actually thinking about that exact same thing a few days ago, I'd like to build a FF extension, but I'm sheer out of time at the moment as I'm doing an internship. If others are interested, we could start up a WikiProject and start writing some requirements. -- Solitude 12:09, Sep 28, 2004 (UTC)

I'm not sure exactly what you are looking for but Mozdev has a Wikipedia search plugin for mozilla firefox at http://mycroft.mozdev.org/download.html - Taxman 22:36, Oct 13, 2004 (UTC)

Few have Mozilla. Go to toolbar.google.com to see the "inspiration" idea. -- user:zanimum

it would be nice to be able to highlight and right-click on a word or phrase and have as options, search for in wikitionary, search for in wikipedia, search for in wikiquote. The bellman 03:08, 2004 Nov 15 (UTC)

Suggestion regarding the layout of WikiP's front page

(arrgh... I just wanted to find the equivalent of a "suggestions box" but it seems one does not exist?! sorry if there is somewhere else I should be posting this)
I like the layout of the front page a lot, (I have observed the incremental design changes over many months, and they have always been nice).
Just one tiny suggestion:
On the front page, there are often situations where it is not easy to tell at a glance what each image is, since images are often placed next to a few unrelated snippets.
Oh wait, it's not so bad, i see the image alt-tags are properly done. Still, it might be nice it was more apparent, some kind of line linking the picture to the identifying word(s) in the text, perhaps? Glueball 07:28, 3 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Notice of intent to reform Iraq War articles

While US propaganda tends to claim that the current battles are simply "insurgency," many others in the world differ. Just as what is now known as the "Vietnam War" (also known as "The War to Save the Nation from the U.S.") was at one time a called "conflict" an "insurgency", with its various battles being "minor incursions."

In the case of now, however, it's not unreasonable to colloquialise current events in accordance with what appears to be conventional wisdom. The submission to the U.S. government terms represents a submission to its claims and assertions of fact, which hold sway over corporate media. Or is it the other way around? Wikimedia is not corporate media, and therefore the terms we use should be more useful. How is it considered "neutral" to refer to the current conflict by the ridiculous terms of Iraqi sovereignty and Human rights situation in post-Saddam Iraq? The central justification claims that the "War" was against Saddam Hussein, and that since Hussein's Iraq is no more, the current battles must find another name. While its understandable that the U.S. media may cowtow to the official line, such ridiculous nomenclaturism only makes a mockery of the first true "world encyclopedia" and of the God-given intellect of its worldwide contributors. Practically speaking, it also makes news articles about these current events difficult to report on a site thats supposed to make reporting easier. The shift from Hussein's militias to insurgent militant rebellion is a logical and natural one, and falls well within the bounds of an Iraq War.

IMHO, a true world encyclopedia should reflect the terms and consensus of the world, and therefore I am hereby making notice of my forthwhile intent to proceed with the re-titling of these articles along truly neutral terms, beginning shortly. Regards, ==SV 18:09, 1 Dec 2004 (UTC)

canonical -- normalized titles for articles about people

People (including me) might have touched on this before, but this is one area where wikipedia seems to me to be weak. If I want to look up someone, I have to get the exact spelling of their full name, or depend on people manually creating redirects. Some articles have many. For example, Martin Luther King Jr. (the famous civil rights activist) seems to have about nine redirects, mostly with variations of a comma between "King" and "Jr", a period after "Jr." or the title "Dr." present or absent, spelled out or abreviated.

I suggest some sort of a normalized attribute, with a value. Something like:

• {LastName:King}

Then, when I search for "King" I could get an automatically created list of all article titles with the last name "King", and pick the right one. This is how a paper encyclopedia (sort of) works. I find the "K" volume, find "King" and then scan through them, because I don't remember if the "Jr" or the "Martin" takes precedence for sorting.

Thoughts?

I like this idea. Maurreen 04:56, 2 Dec 2004 (UTC)

See List of people by name -- it's currently maintained manually, and is thus always incomplete, but it's a start. [[User:CatherineMunro|Catherine\^talk]] 05:03, 2 Dec 2004 (UTC)

It is true that List of people by name exists, but having something loike that maintained manually is not a good practice. Since wikipedia is implemented with computers, I suggest that keeping two parts of the data in syncronization is something that computers can do much better than can people. What I am suggesting would enable one to create an article about a person, and not have to create many redirects of every permutation of punctaion in his name and not have to enter the name manually on a list, but to have the benefits of having done so. Morris 05:22, Dec 2, 2004 (UTC)

Also, now on earth would a new user of wikipedia know that List of people by name even exists, unless he happens to type that exact title in the search box. Morris 05:22, Dec 2, 2004 (UTC)

Thirdly, yes, I realize that I made a similar posting some time in the past. Morris 05:22, Dec 2, 2004 (UTC)

Maybe it would be good to bring up on the "Technical" section. Maurreen 05:20, 4 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Links to sources that charge for information

Given a point I made (see Media of the United States#Internet) about links to organisations that charge to see articles, would it be useful to make a list of newspapers, etc. that charge to see their archives and those that don't? This might be handy for wikipedia editors who want to put a link in to corroborate some part of their article, but who would prefer not to use a source that charges for its material. In the UK, for instance, the BBC and The Guardian seem to keep all old articles on-line for free, whereas The Independent doesn't. It might help charging organisations to change their policy if, say, links/wisits to their web sites were to reduce significantly because wikipedia took a stance to keep its editors informed on this matter. If this hasn't already been done, I propose a List of sites that have a charging policy for access information. Matt Stan 09:51, 29 Nov 2004 (UTC)

A few examples of prominent such sites (pioneering charging for information, high revenue, failed attempts, etc) would be useful, but could be embedded in prose in another article. I don't think a separate list is needed. Wikipedia is not a web directory. — David Remahl 10:33, 29 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I agree about wikipedia not being a web directory, but the purpose of the list I'm proposing is different. When you first read a link - new information - it is often not made chargeable. Then the proprietors change it so later visitors cannot find the item without paying. If I knew in advance - from a list in wikipedia - which outfits were going to pay-protect their pages, it would affect how I reported the information: I'd write it knowing that the facts I was covering would effectively disappear soon, whereas if I use sources like the BBC, etc., I know that the stuff will likely remain around a long time. I'm just being pragmatic. There's no point is duplicating information in wikipedia that is covered better elsewhere on the internet, whereas there's every point in making use of time-limited information while it is available, and providing guidance to wikipedia contributors of what is time-limited. And I'm being political: if less people visit a news site because they don't like it's charging policy (or because the people writing links don't put links to that site), then that site goes down in the ratings and loses advertising revenue. I'm suggesting that wikipedia contributors should never unwittingly write links to pay-to-view pages. Matt Stan 20:03, 29 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Everything in Wikipedia is available elsewhere in one way or another. While I agree with your sentiment, no part of Wikipedia's purpose is to be political. Creating this list of sites would open the door for lists of any class of web sites. Besides, charging policies can change at any time; there is no guarantee that BBC will stay free for all (they may limit it to British license payees, for example). Sources on pay-to-view pages should be regarded in the same way as any other source (the same way as we'd reference a newspaper article in a pay-for-an-issue newspaper). External links should be chosen based on relevance, accessibilty and utility, and pay-to-view arguably decreases the accessibility. — David Remahl 22:37, 29 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I'm happy to substitute pragmatic for political in this context - whether or not Wikipedia is political depends on your definition of politics (Politics is the process and method of decision-making for groups of human beings. according to the first line of that article, though I might change that to Politics is the process and method of influencing decision-making for groups of human beings.) but that is another debate entirely, and political institutions have been identified in other primate species anyway, according to naturalists. Matt Stan 19:31, 1 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Actually the BBC web site is backed up elsewhere, somewhere in California I think, I can't remember the reference. Matt Stan 19:31, 1 Dec 2004 (UTC)

If charging policies vary - and hopefully more will be (in our favour) if my initiative is endorsed - then someone will soon catch on and our list can be varied. Matt Stan 19:31, 1 Dec 2004 (UTC)

It is the point about reduced accessibility which is key, and why I hope someone will become my ally in taking this initative, which I'll probably start anyway some time, if the plague of pay-to-view sites becomes too irritating. Matt Stan 19:31, 1 Dec 2004 (UTC)

What I had hoped was that someone might get so enthusiatic about the idea that they'd write an extension to the wiki that automatically checked the list of pay sites whenever someone tried to put a link to one into a wikipedia article. One could then be given the option of proceeding or searching for another web site that wasn't on the list. The same expedient could be used to check for sites that supplied porn and lie-ware and the like, so as to help keep wikipedia clean of links to undesirable sites. And the list would be one that wikipedians could themselves control. If you allowed users to have a setting to decide which lists the wiki browsed upon link creation then separately maintained lists could be used to suit all preferences. It think the implementation would be to make a list of lists within the user's namespace, and then checking against that list when saving an edit. I don't know enough about wiki technical architecture to know how feasible this would be. Matt Stan 19:31, 1 Dec 2004 (UTC)

This might be appropriate in the new "Sources" category. Maurreen 04:41, 2 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Deletionism

I noticed the word "deletionism", apparently refering to someone who has a tendency to delete things for whatever reason. It occured to me that a malicious net surfer may be tempted by the format of Wikipedia to simply come in and go through the pages deleting EVERYTHING. It's easy to have revert fights over phrasing or inclusion of certain parts of certain pages, but does Wiki have some way to protect against firebombing of this type?

The worst a random surfer could do is blank the page -- i.e., edit the page, delete all the text and save. We can easily restore the previous text using the page history, as every version of every page is saved in our database -- in fact, it takes us less work to restore than it takes him to do it in the first place. And if he did this to several pages in a row, he would rapidly be banned for vandalism. (See Wikipedia:Replies to common objections for more.)

The only people who can delete a page permanently are admins who are voted for by the community, and even then they have to go through the Wikipedia:Votes for deletion process (except for obvious speedy deletions, like copyright violations and "afdja" and "Matt is gay"). The words "deletionists" and "inclusionist" are used for the spectrum of Wikpedians with differing philosophies on the value of any given article -- inclusionists don't see why we shouldn't have articles on, say, recipes, high schools, web comics, or Pokemons, as long as the information is verifiable and NPOV, where deletionists will tend to try to delete anything that's not encyclopedic and notable. The two also tend to differ on what to do with low-quality "stub" articles (especially on borderline topics) -- should they be left to grow, or should they be deleted? The arguments over what "encyclopedic" and "notable" mean, and what it means that Wikipedia is not paper, and how VFD affects contributors (especially new ones), are ongoing and unlikely to be solved soon. Personally, I think it's the very tension between the two that keeps the thing working reasonably well, just as the tension between liberal and conservative in politics ought to keep us from either stagnating or going off on wild idealistic tangents. But that's just me. Hope that illuminates....[[User:CatherineMunro|Catherine\^talk]] 04:56, 26 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Even admins can't delete articles permanently: while "deleted" articles are not visible to non-admins, other admins can view and undelete the deleted pages. There is even a page, WP:VFU to vote for deleted pages to be undeleted. Edit histories can be lost if, for example, page moves/merges are screwed up, and deleted images are gone permanently and can't be undeleted, though. -- ALoan (Talk) 11:45, 26 Nov 2004 (UTC)

There is, however, a tendendency to find bits of articles getting deleted, apparently for no reason other than that someone didn't like what they were reading. I prefer the term deletionitis. Is there a guideline regarding taking information out of articles? My notion of an encyclopedia is that it should be encyclopedic, which I think in the vernacular is used to mean all-embracing. (From www.dictionary.com: Embracing many subjects; comprehensive.) Therefore relevant information should never be taken out of wikipedia, only re-arranged when it becomes unwieldy, or replaced when it becomes obsolete. And space is not an issue, since I gather the whole of wikipedia still fits on one CD. It there a principle of non-deletion that is applied in the wikipedia editing guidelines? Matt Stan 20:16, 29 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I generally agree, but the problem is that it can become a trivia repository. This is especially a problem when someone adds the same bit of trivia to half a dozen or more articles. -- Jmabel | Talk 00:25, Nov 30, 2004 (UTC)

One person's trivia is another person's useful information. For instance, in the Bash article I included installation instructions for the Bash software, but on the Bash talk page comments were made that software installation instructions are not appropriate in an encyclopedia. It's not possible to decide every case in advance via policy, so we have this dynamic tension. [[User:Franl|— franl ^talk]] 00:29, Dec 1, 2004 (UTC)

The Semantic Wikipedia

Moved to WIkipedia:Semantic Wikipedia proposal

Linked to pages

Hey, why not have a page where you can see pages that are linked too by many other pages and pages that are linked to by no other pages? If there's a page that is linked to by hundreds of others, it definetly needs lots of attention to make sure it's a good page, since it'll get a lot of hits. If there's a page that is linked to by no other pages, but is a very good page, then you can go through the wikipedia and make some intrawiki links where applicable so it'll get more traffic. What do you guys think? -Cookiemobsta 18:47, 6 Dec 2004 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Offline reports/This is one of the most linked to articles and the rarely updated Special:Lonelypages. -- Cyrius|✎ 19:02, 6 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Fancruft

I'd like you to join the discussion on Wikipedia talk:Fancruft. This deliberately is not a policy announcement; I want a lot of things clarified before we start bashing each other's heads in with neat policy suggestions. What are your ideas on what fancruft is, and whether it's bad for Wikipedia? JRM 01:08, 2004 Dec 6 (UTC)

WikiClub on my user page

Seeing my Wikiclub standard page has being proposed to be deleted, I've transfered the data my user page. Please would you join or propose ideas to better it --Computerjoe 10:43, 5 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Plurals in "page not found" text

(English-specific Wikipedia suggestion, though could be applied to other languages with consistent plural forms.)

For those who haven't grokked that article names are all singular and try to go to (eg.) "Aerofoils", what about something like the following for any "page not found" where the topic ends in S?

Is this name a plural? Wikipedia article names are all singular (did you mean [Aerofoil]?).

(Dunno if this is a big enough problem to merit a solution, really. I usually type in the address bar rather than using search/goto boxes.) [unsigned]

Not sure I like this, but I do recommend lots of redirects from plurals. When you are adding an article and a plural seems likely, add that redirect as a matter of course. -- Jmabel | Talk 20:45, Dec 2, 2004 (UTC)

Hmm. I actually don't like the idea of lots of redirects from plurals; it seems wasteful of space. --Suitov 13:07, 6 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Space is cheap, especially redirects which are usually 20 characters or less -- wholly negligible in computer terms. Redirects are very valuable -- think of each one as a "see also" entry in an index bigger than any Britannica could imagine. Sure, Britannica wouldn't bother creating an index entry for "apples" that reads "see apple", but they've got static alphabetization on their side (we are hyperlinkorama, very little here is alphabetized), space limitations working against them (we're actually happy if our index has ten times as many entries as our encylopedia), AND they have no worries that some new contributor down the road, writing an article about yummy Fuji apples, is going to write [[apples]] instead of [[apple]]s, and thus have it show up as a red link, tempting someone else to say "what!? they have no article on apples! why, I'll have to write it myself....!"  :) [[User:CatherineMunro|Catherine\^talk]] 07:13, 7 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Sandbox

A Sandbox really doesn't give much to the imagination. Have you ever played in a sandbox as a child? There's sand, and that's it. Therefore, I propose that the Wikipedia:Sandbox be renamed and moved to Wikipedia:Play-Doh Super Fun Factory. DrZoidberg 17:32, 8 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Well, Wikipedia is not for advertising. We can't use Play-Doh in any case, as that's a trademark. And I beg to differ that a sandbox isn't evocative enough. Read the article—it's spawned some interesting metaphors, and some interesting vandalism, which I just reverted. And you have seen Wikipedia:Sandbox In-sand-ity, right?

Oh, and nice attempt to get into Wikipedia:Bad jokes and other deleted nonsense, by the way. At least—I hope it's that. :-) JRM 17:53, 2004 Dec 8 (UTC)

I was serious! But if it's really that stupid, then never mind, I guess... DrZoidberg 17:55, 8 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Stupid is a big word. "Interesting in an amusing sort of way" covers it better. Hey, it's the Sandbox. It's tradition. We'd sooner disallow anonymous users to edit articles than rename the Sandbox. (OK, so maybe not, but still...) JRM 18:04, 2004 Dec 8 (UTC)

Hey, I just realized something... If the Sandbox was located at Wikipedia:Play-Doh Super Fun Factory that would get rid of all those problems with people editing the Sandbox article. (There's currently no article at Play-Doh Super Fun Factory). DrZoidberg 18:08, 8 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I was sorely tempted, sorely sorely tempted to turn that into a redirect to Wikipedia:Sandbox... but I didn't. :-) Why not Wikipedia:Anything goes, then? Or Wikipedia:Edit me? Or... I've got it... Wikipedia:Quicksandbox? B-) JRM 18:17, 2004 Dec 8 (UTC)

Let's make a whole bunch of them! Wikipedia:Black Hole, Wikipedia:Playground, Wikipedia:Goo Lagoon, Wikipedia:Letters to the Editor, Wikipedia:Vandalism Wall, Wikipedia:Do-It-Yourself Hardware Store... DrZoidberg 18:21, 8 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I like "Letters to the Editor" a lot. This could easily be a valuable page for satire from regular contributors. Especially the implication that Wikipedia has an editor is hilarious. Of course, we shouldn't encourage people to waste time on not contributing to articles... Nooo, nooo.JRM 18:35, 2004 Dec 8 (UTC)

You mean there's articles here...? :-) DrZoidberg 19:33, 8 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Speaking of Vandalism Wall - we could even put some multicoloured spraycans up in the edit space. And refer to sandboxers as vandals. Nice--Wonderfool 14:15, 9 Dec 2004 (UTC)

IDEA!! Make a Sandbox namespace!! So we could have all sorts of sandboxes: Sandbox:Main, Sandbox:Play-Doh Super Fun Factory, Sandbox:Vandalism Wall, etc... DrZoidberg 15:45, 9 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Arrgghhh, stop it, my damn brain hurts! We've already made it into Wikipedia:Sandbox In-sand-ity, isn't that enough?! We ought to be blocked for this nonsense. And why not just make wikisandbox.org a new wiki? JRM 19:05, 2004 Dec 9 (UTC)

YEAH!! Make wikisandbox.org a new wiki! One big virtual playground! That would rule!! DrZoidberg 20:38, 9 Dec 2004 (UTC)

A bit like http://test.wiki.x.io then? (Although of course that is doubly unstable, because developers use it to sandbox unfinished software features as well...) - IMSoP 22:32, 9 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Grammar

I don't know if it would be worth wild, but perhaps a dedicated project page for Grammar or something? I would be generally interested in having an area of the Wikipedia for the sole purpose of people checking grammar errors when it's sent for, specifically, grammar checkup and cleanup. I don't think a project page is needed for spelling, as more or less the project typo can take care of that. But as to oddly constructed sentences, I would like actual opinion, Wiki style, discussing on sentences or paragraphs and such about grammar structure. I do not claim to have extremely good grammar, but I feel that such a project is worth wild. Project members really could improve their grammar. -- AllyUnion (talk) 07:37, 8 Dec 2004 (UTC)

One area that this would be particularly useful is for those articles created by Wikipedia editors whose native language is not English. There are many of them who are creating interesting and important articles, but for some of those editors, the articles that they create have grammar that needs some cleanup. Sometimes, especially for an articles written by someone whose primary language is another European language such as Spanish, usually there are just some minor problems and some spell-checking that is needed. For other languages, such as Japanese or Chinese, where the the syntax is quite different from English, there are often missing articles, reversed word order, etc. It would be nice if there was a template that could be added to the article's talk page (template:grammar check, that would also add a category (category:Wikipedia grammar check) in the same way that the template:cleanup works. The grammar-check template could be added when the article is created. Once the article had been grammar-checked, then the template could be removed. [[User:GK|gK ¿?]] 10:00, 8 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I hear the distant rumble of yet another vote on the subject of U.S. versus British/International/Other grammar. And that's after the proscriptive/descriptive debate. What most articles written by non-native speakers need is a simple proofread; trying to impose a single view grammar on Wikipedia is a dark horse of a different colour entirely. Filiocht 10:54, Dec 8, 2004 (UTC)

I think the template idea has potential, but probably only if there were people committed to following up on it. Maurreen 15:38, 8 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I don't see how this is related to any English vs. English issue. Long before coming to Wikipedia I knew US English spelling was, um, "unique". Since coming to Wikipedia I have discovered that meanings of words vary far more than I ever would have guessed (EG the in some ways opposite meaning of the word "dock", or the more subtle difference in the meaning of the word "pier"), but I can't think of any grammar differences off the top of my head--"School burned down" (missing article) is incorrect grammar in any form of English, AFAIK. I would say the focus should more be just flagging articles that need grammatical help, rather than setting a rigid grammatical style/standard. Niteowlneils 17:48, 11 Dec 2004 (UTC)

In my opinion, I think the best course is to aim for grammar readability. As opposed to a set standard. -- AllyUnion (talk) 08:16, 9 Dec 2004 (UTC)

And certainly not the grammar police. Filiocht 14:26, Dec 9, 2004 (UTC)

Of course not. It would be a wiki style editing of the page of how to correct the page's grammar. Basically, we would use subpages (or sections) and have a discussion on what people think is grammarically incorrect, come to an agreement on a readable, grammar-correct, preferably NPOV, sentence. -- AllyUnion (talk) 07:54, 10 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Target blank

Is it sensible to have the external linking to open in a new window? Having them open in the same window can lead to the user (particularly one not used to wikipedia and who doesn't know the name) leaving the site, perhaps never to come back. I should think this ought to be easy to implement (though I wouldn't know), and perhaps changeable in "preferences". What do we think? Smoddy 17:40, 7 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Opening links in a new window is very, very, very annoying. It's quite simple to open any link in a new window if you want to. It's something the user should decide to do, not the site. At the very least, if this is made a preference, it should default to off. If users leave the site and never come back, too bad. If someone can't work out how to use the back button or open links in new windows by themselves, I can't imagine they'll manage to grasp wiki markup either. Shane King 00:59, Dec 8, 2004 (UTC)

Stub category

Is there a reason for there not being a main stub category in the msg:stub template? I see no reason not to have it... JOHN COLLISON [ Ludraman] 18:42, 1 Dec 2004 (UTC)

{{msg:stub}} is the older version of {{stub}} - Skysmith 08:33, 2 Dec 2004 (UTC)

No, I meant that geo-stub will add Category:Geographical stubs to any page it's added to, but stub does not add Category:Stubs. Is there a reason for this? JOHN COLLISON [ Ludraman] 17:48, 2 Dec 2004 (UTC)

It once did, Category:Stub. The category got too big and unwieldy so it was taken out. Goplat 15:51, 10 Dec 2004 (UTC)

merging login of all Wikipedia languages

I am new so maybe, I'm just not doing something right, but, when working on partner wikis (other languages) I am asked to login agian but my English Wikipedia username and passcode do not exist on the other projects. I think that when working through the different Wikipedia could be facilitated if the username/passcode would work throughout the spaces.

This has been discussed a lot before, see m:Single login. Goplat 01:15, 15 Dec 2004 (UTC)

the Covenant and the Covenant (disambiguation) pages

i'm about to finish merging the Covenant and the Covenant (disambiguation) pages. i have had it proposed in the convenant talk page for some time with no results. there are enough types of 'covenant' that it would seem appropriate to catagoized them appropriatly and redirect the covenant page to the Covenant (disambiguation) page.

as of this post, all i have done is copy the contents of the Covenant page to the Covenant (disambiguation) page, and in doing so, remove some of the duplicate entries. i have not removed any content from the Covenant (disambiguation) page because if i'm in the wrong by starting this process, there will be significantly less to correct due to my assumptions and ignorance. Ramius V. Schweitzer 00:27, Dec 13, 2004 (UTC)

If you are simply merging the two pages, the end results should be found at Covenant. The only time we need a Covenant (disambiguation) page is when there is already a non-disambiguating article at Covenant. —Mike 04:12, Dec 15, 2004 (UTC)

thanks for the thought. Ramius V. Schweitzer 04:56, Dec 15, 2004 (UTC)

Requiring seconding on VfD

See Wikipedia talk:Votes for deletion for discussion of a proposal that would require all VfD nominations to be seconded or booted from the page. - SimonP 18:28, Dec 12, 2004 (UTC)

Semantic Wikipedia 2.0

I added a new proposal how to use metadata on the Wikipedia:Semantic Wikipedia proposal--Alexandre Van de Sande 14:10, 12 Dec 2004 (UTC)

wikidating wikipersonals

Could we figure out a new way to do dating using wiki? I really don't like the many dating sites I find. -Jeff

So you want to turn this into something you won't like, either? -- Jmabel | Talk 20:30, Dec 10, 2004 (UTC)

A personals site is a bit outside the Wikimedia Foundation's mission, I think. -- Cyrius|✎ 22:55, 10 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Might be refreshing to read ads that are factually accurate and written from the neutral point of view. The edit wars would be horrible, however. And can you imagine what it would do to Wikipedia:Dates for Deletion?JRM 23:11, 2004 Dec 10 (UTC)

Hmmm, I can see the ads now: Single, brainy, male physicist seeks single, nerdy female who like butterflies and long walks along the beach. ...or something like that. Jeff, perhaps you could start your own site on Wikicities. The major problem with having wiki personals is that anyone could come along and edit your personal ad! Now wouldn't that be a trip.  :-) —Mike 04:05, Dec 15, 2004 (UTC)

Follow-up to fancruft - proposal retracted, but see links

There has been some discussion at Wikipedia talk:Fancruft (see also above), and several Wikipedians feel that our database is currently overloaded with fancr... err, articles about topics of very little general interest. It has been suggested to either remove the randompage functionality entirely or to hide it from not-logged-in users, to avoid leaving a negative impression with the general audience. Please read the discussion and give your opinions here. Kosebamse 14:12, 10 Dec 2004 (UTC)

• As there seems to be little interest to discuss this, I'll retract my proposal, but see the discussion at Wikipedia talk:Fancruft and especially Wikipedia talk:Fancruft/Geogre's thoughts. Kosebamse 05:49, 14 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Requested Articles - Sport

Have been browsing the Wikipedia:Requested articles/sports page to see if there are any Association football players I could write articles on, but with the huge volume of teams and individuals this proved an impossible task. Wouldn't it be better to divide the sport section again, so fans of a particular sport can easily see which articles have been requested within their field of knowledge? Grunners 23:30, 16 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Wikipedia needs to be more multi-cultural? Less?

The strength of wikipedia comes from not the sheer numbers of its readers, but its diversity and knowledge as well. I have read far too many non-European and non-North American related articles on Wikipedia that will probably make many non-Europeans and non-Americans laugh.

I will give an example. It is a article on Wikipedia that I've read on Liu Bei. It gives a folktale version of how the three brothers met! In fact, there was no mention of how they even met historically. Romance of the Three Kingdoms is not some obscure event in time that had no cultural significant. I sure wouldn't trust Wikipedia as a reference for a school project on Liu Bei, and I sure wouldn't trust Wikipedia on anything 'foreign'. I mean, how would you feel if the tables were turned, and you came upon a "Chinese Wikipedia" that says historically, King Arthur was made king by pulling a sword from a rock, and with the help of his magical sidekick Merlin? Is Wikipedia even professional?

Being Eurocentric is not a good way to built a good online resource community. Rather, expand articles for more langauges so that not only people who understand English can access them. By breaking the langauge barriers and attracting more diversity of readers will certainly make Wikipedia bigger and more resourceful for all.

What do you mean by "breaking the langauge barriers", or "expand articles for more langauges". Your homily is long on ideals and short on any practical suggestions. You've discovered that the English wikipedia has a - gasp - English bias. Sherlock Holmes this does not make you. Comments like "Is Wikipedia even professional?" say more about you than about wikipedia. You'll forgive me if I'm a little incenced by your comment. Your example, above, could be put another way. The English wikipedia has a circa 1000 word article on a - by anyones standards, surely - fairly obscure Chinese historical figure. You think there is a single error in it - that three people 2000 years ago were "close comrades" not "sworn brothers". And on that you hang some sort of "is not multicultural" argument. I would opine that the "is not multicultural" encyclopedia would not have had the article in the first place. Bah. --Tagishsimon (talk)

To be a little less prickly about it -- yes, we are certainly aware we have a bias. (See Countering systemic bias to help us address the problem.) We're also only three years old, and made up entirely of volunteers, many of whom have historically been young, white, male and geeky. That's changing now, but on the average, our past editorship's experience with Chinese history and mythology has probably been based more on Hong Kong films than on proper scholarship. Now, do we consider this acceptable? No. Do we plan to change it? Absolutely. Do you have suggestions for attracting people to write about it? Please pass them on -- we're getting fabulous new editors every day, but we'd love to have more to attend to these neglected areas. And if nothing else, come see us in five or ten years, and I bet we'll have better coverage of Liu Bei than any other source on the net -- in fact, now that you've drawn attention to it, I bet it will improve within the week. Best wishes to you.... Catherine\^talk 23:22, 16 Dec 2004 (UTC)

There are actually quite a few well-written articles about Chinese historical figures, such as Sima Qian. Check out more quality articles about Chinese people linked from this page: User:Fuzheado/jmsc0101 — J3ff 02:31, 17 Dec 2004 (UTC)

New upload page

I'm aware that there has been discussion for a while now on whether and when and how to update the upload page to better encourage image tagging. This has become more important since Commons went up.

The humongous image tagging project is now underway, and at present velocity we should be done around the New Year. But with the old upload page, people will keep uploading new images without tagging them. Is there any idea of a date of arrival for a new image upload page? – Quadell ^{(talk) (help)}[[]] 13:56, Dec 16, 2004 (UTC)

Departments idea

This has been bugging my brain for about two or three days; I say bugging meaniong that it has crossed my mind multiple times: Maybe we can make a page for each category, i.e. Culture, Sports, Music, Film, Medicine, etc. We'd call these pages for example "Medicine department" and on those pages we would make a list of contributors who have provided a considerable amount of help to each department. That way, when cooperating with each other, at least we know what contributor would be able to answer some of our own questions about a subject. I would definitely be in the Sports department cause of my contributions to boxing mainly, aviation department and music and film departments.

What do you guys think?

"Antonio Redefiner Martin" 2:49 (MST), December 14, 2004.

I have suggested something similar before. Yes, I think it's a good idea. Fredrik | talk 12:38, 15 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Why not just beef up Wikipedia:List of Wikipedians by fields of interest? -- Jmabel | Talk 21:57, Dec 15, 2004 (UTC)

I think that there are already a number of different areas on the Wikipedia that might cover what Antonio and Fredrik are looking for. There are the Wikipedia:WikiProjects (including aviation and music in the active projects and the apparently moribund WikiProject_Movies and WikiProject Sports that you would have to revive (see also Category:WikiProjects for a more complete list of all the WikiProjects). There are also the various Regional wikipedian notice boards. And finally, there are the Collaborations of the Week (including one for music, plus the entertainment collaboration of the week that includes films. (For a not-yet-well-formatted page showing what all the current collaborations of the week are doing, see User:GK/Collaborations). [[User:GK|gK ¿?]] 02:51, 16 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Also see Category:Wikipedians. Maurreen 16:45, 16 Dec 2004 (UTC)

5 days left to nominate for the Webbys— is Wikipedia in?

See: Talk:Webby_Awards#5_days_left.97_is_Wikipedia_in.3F

Wikimanity?

This has certainly been proposed. What about a Wikimanity with one page by human being.

A start towards the genealogy of all humanity. Amateur genealogists, historians, geneticians may help. People who have some clues about their family may contribute. --Milaiklainim 13:48, 14 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Do you mean a page for every single human in the world? 6.5 billion pages? — J3ff 03:51, 15 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Loads more, actually, because that would mean every sigle human being who has ever lived and left a trace of themselves and everybody who would die and be born after the start of the project. Would consume major part of the Wikimedia server load for a single reason that all those 6.5 billion living now would want to include all their relatives (multiple by the minimum of 10) and everyone they have heard about. Count me out. - Skysmith 10:05, 15 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Yes, that is what I meant, one page for each human being living or dead. Actually, it is not as impossible as it may seem, for a number of reasons:

-- to start with the obvious, the project will develop over a very long time. Amateur genealogists on the Internet do not consume millions of pages. Most likely, for a number of years, only a few thousands, or maybe tens of thousands, people will be included. It can be compared to the original Wikipedia idea, to have one page on each subject that can be thought about. It does not put billions of pages into existence in a matter of days, although there are certainly billions of subjects that still can be treated.

-- Also, even billions of page can be handled, as search engines show.

-- And of course, the technology is rapidly evolving. Even if in the end, such a project had enough contributors to generate one hundred billion page (an estimated number of all past and present humanity), it may not be a major problem in ten or twenty years.

-- For the time being, the concern could even be the opposite: will it be enough people to take the time and the effort to write about the people they know? I bet they won't be that many contributions at the beginning.

But above all, wouldn't it be a wonderful and exciting project? It could document human history as ever before. --Milaiklainim 11:04, 15 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Ditto Milaiklainim. I just wrote my biography on my user page.For the record, my family's background is composed by a large list of witches and also Christians, of which I identify myself with the latter..lol. --

"Antonio Helpless Wikipediholic Martin" 04:43, Dec 15, 2004 (MST)

If this project ever gets off the ground, I explicitly forbid that it contain a page on me. Filiocht 11:16, Dec 15, 2004 (UTC)

It's a wiki. You would have to put in at least a placeholder saying "grr! bugger off!" or someone would write it for you :-) --Phil | Talk 14:18, Dec 15, 2004 (UTC)

Yep. But he's got a point. If this project exists some day (and it seems to me quite obvious that it will some day, even if not in the next few months or years) there will be a privacy issue. There could be a rule saying that anyone could ask for her/his own page to be left empty, if wished so.

As for Antonio's family, I bet it's related to mine, somehow :)

I was thinking today about this project, and I thought it could be a great way to see how close we are to each other (think about Small world experiment). Anyway, it have something to do with knowledge, in general, like an encyclopedia does too. --Milaiklainim 15:57, 15 Dec 2004 (UTC)

If it does there will be this list of future daily Internet annoyances:

1. Check e-mail for spam

2. Update anti-spam software

3. Update antivirus software

4. Update anti-spyware software

5. Check that nobody has wrote you up in Wikimanity OR, if you already have an entry, check what somebody has wrote of you. Unless someone is already selling Wikimanity Monitoring Software.

6. Donate more money to Wikimedia foundation so it can continue to fight lawsuits based on libel, invasion of privacy, defamation of character and various suits connected to various forms of fraud.

Wikimanity would include information of multitude of ordinary people. Of course, spammers, fraudsters, con artists and hotreaders would regard the project as a godsend. Identity theft would never be easier. Impostors could write themselves in (some questionable pretenders have apparently already tried). Conmen could more easily convince their victims that they are long-lost relatives or former friends of a recently deceased. At worst, it would also make work of assassins and death squads easier in their pursuit of dissidents, refugees and inconvenient witnesses.

If the project would be as open as wikipedia - that is, everybody could add an entry - there would be a definite problem. Every day there are dozens of would-be-entries equivalent to "my headmaster is a sadist", "my classmate is a pervert" and "my neighbour is a crook". You never usually see them because they are speedily deleted and do not show up in the Votes for Deletion. They are entries about ordinary people. Should we preserve something of that rubbish for perusal so everyone can see its rather questionable quality?

Presume that the entry is about you and anyone - rival employee, jealous neighbour, angry ex-spouse, obsessed ex-mate, neighborhood rumormonger - can write everything they want. It does not have to be directly insulting but hint to things that others can connect to something unfavourable.

Next suggestion would probably be that everyone could write their own entry. First, how can you verify that the person who claims to be Mr Whoever is not Mrs Somebody Else? Besides, that's what homepages and blogs are for. So maybe the server sends you an email every time somebody makes an edit to your entry, so you can check whether you accept the change or not. How much of your daily life will be consumed to maintain your reputation? And if using Linux has saved you from the majority of viruses and spyware, it does not help in this case.

Next assume that whoever wrote up an entry about you is sincere and honest, just wanting to help. "I wrote him up because he was such a nice person. Maybe he could find a mate that way. I even included a picture. He never told me anything about his past". Maybe he had a good reason.

Some potential headlines:

((Deleted. See here under))

"But it would be such an awesome project!". Walk that path alone. Count me out. At least until someone writes something inaccurate about me. - Skysmith 17:36, 15 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Hi. I deleted the three "potential headlines" here above, not in order to weaken your point, but because they may be googlized and, if read out of context, misinterpreted as real things. OK, you have a point; maybe I strongly understimate people's capacity to be mischievous. Nevertheless, does the above occur with the actual Wikipedia? -- I am not trying to prove you wrong or anything here, I am just asking in order to know better. Do people often get into other people user pages? Do people create wikipedia pages or modify Wikipedia pages in order to harm others? Also, there are lots of page about people on Wikipedia (actresses, actors, artists...). Are they often vandalized? Do they actually trigger legal suits to Wikipedia? -- As for death squads and sorts, Google for instance was certainly also a godsend to them. But is the problem arisen about Google? OK, as I said, these questions do not aim at proving you wrong. I admit that letting people writing about yourself or about others may raise the problems you listed. What would you say about limiting such a project to people who passed away? Or limiting the information to, say, up to year 1950?.

• To restate the point, the headlines referred to witness protection programs, inadmissible evidence and juries (that is, lawyers could try to argue that wikimanity would prejudice juries).

I do not mean only mischievousness but outright potential for criminal use. Most of the vandalism in wikipedia pages is removed very quickly and do not cause lawsuits. However, Wikimanity would include significant amount of common humanity that could, at worst, include humongous class action suits. Not to mention that the pages would run afoul of various national privacy laws.

Some userpages have been vandalized, sometimes by other wikipedia users as a result of vicious edit wars and similar conflicts. Most of the anonymous vandalism is made against the articles about famous people by those who dislike them for one reason or another (for example, "Gloria Steinem is a bitch"). Most of those are swiftly corrected. Now, in wikimanity the effect would be increased thousandfold. Absolutely everyone who dislikes you, an ordinary person, in any way would have a potential to insult you in public. Monitoring the page about yourself would become a necessity. Not to mention various forms of trolls who like to annoy everyone just for their own amusement. That would not contribute to the reliability of Wikimedia in general.

Dozens of anons try to create insulting and derogatory pages about their classmates or others in their neighborhood every single day (often in US daylight hours). They are usually marked {{delete}} and speedily deleted. Only vanity pages end up in a Votes for Deletion (and Wikimanity would also include humongous variety of them). Monitor deletion log for a couple of days in appropriate times to see what I mean.

Most people who want to keep a low profile for whatever reason do not have pages or blogs in the web. Google only indexes pages that people have voluntary uploaded. I have heard reports of some crackers that have vandalized personal homepages but I do not know how common they actually are. Now, a well-meaning neigbor could write someone up in Wikimanity ("You just have to be included in this magnificent project!") that could also include details someone could use to identify you (law enforcement have their own databanks). Not to mention the other neighbor who is convinced that you are a devil worshiper or drug dealer because you "sure look like it". Malicious rumormongers would have a field day.

So far, assassins and death squads have to do their own research. Luckily, to my knowledge, picture search software is not reliable - yet.

To illustrate some of the points what a conman or impostor could try to do (instead of harvesting some other source):

• To find people with the surname Drake (see Oscar Hartzell
• Insert themselves and at least hint that they are a heir (Cassie Chadwick) or eligible for a throne (Alexis Brimeyer)
• Refer to fates of already dead but non-famous people to falsely claim that they are survivors of some atrocity (Binjamin Wilkomirski)
• Refer to things that are covered by official secrets act or equivalent to gain fame (George Dupre)
• To use information about non-famous people to use their credentials (Ferdinand Waldo Demara)
• To insert themselves as non-famous relative of a celebrity (David Hampton and Christopher Rocancourt) (and the celebrity would have enough clout to cause trouble)
• To find people who have gone MIA in a war and come to their grieving relatives with the "information" that the MIA is actually living in a foreign country or a secret prison camp and they need give more money to get them back.

And once these things will be exposed, it would not do any good to our reputation.

To my knowledge, dead people cannot be libeled but that does not stop their living relatives from taking you to court for some other reason. There are even cases when a writers of fiction has been sued because relatives of some dearly departed think that the antagonist in some of their books is supposedly based on them. Not to mention edit wars between two branches of a family who either want to "expose a monster" or "restore a reputation of a great person". Some of the most heated family arguments have took centuries.

As for dead people, there was a idea about wikimorial of sorts, but it seems to be in back burner somewhere (could not find it) - Skysmith 09:24, 16 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Thank you Skysmith for this injection of common sense. Filiocht 10:47, Dec 16, 2004 (UTC)

I found it on http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Quarto/0409/En-4

Thank you Skysmith for answering my questions.

Adding a "utilities" link to the sidebar

I hope this proposal is not too controversial. I feel that there should be a link to Wikipedia:Utilities on the sidebar. I propose this for three reasons: 1) many non-regulars (especially new users) seem not to know that many maintenance, deletion, and other pages exist on Wikipedia; 2) while it's worthwhile to make note of these pages in the Recent Changes header, space is necessarily limited; a list of utility pages has effectively no such space constraint; and 3) having a utility link always available will be helpful and convenient even for regular editors. Discuss this proposal. Peter O. (Talk, automation script) 01:33, Dec 22, 2004 (UTC)

I agree - it's a shame the utilities page is quite so long, but it is, and all the links on there are useful. Good idea. Smoddy 13:51, 22 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I also agree. This will make housekeeping much easier. -- Toytoy 16:45, Dec 22, 2004 (UTC)

I like the idea. --Stevietheman 22:37, 22 Dec 2004 (UTC)

News category

I was thinking that it might be an idea to have Category:News (and Category:In the news 2004 or Category:In the news December 2004) for articles that have been noteworthy during a certain time. An example would be Rumaisa Rahman, the smallest baby ever born, who was in the news from the 20th of December for that simple fact. Not wanting to cast doubt on her future achievements but what are the possibilities that that article will be linked to from many others? And the only suitable category at present is Category:2004 births. I know that some articles could be in the news over numerous years or months, but my main idea is to categorise news stories (articles) that are one-offs. Good idea or pointless? violet/riga (t) 00:34, 22 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I've created this as a bit of a skeleton concept - please visit Category talk:News for discussion. violet/riga (t) 11:51, 22 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Make Newpages more visible

This is a must... I've been watching Special:Newpages today, and therefore caught lots of vanity/nonsense articles I listed as speedy deletion candidates. Problem is, the Newpages page doesn't appear in a visible location and it turns out that many Wikipedians don't even know it exists. I myself have to access it either through typing the address or making a link on my own userpage, either way, not very efficient. Why not just add it under Recent Changes, or as a link from Recent changes, or to the top navbar when logged in? Solver 16:44, 18 Dec 2004 (UTC)

It is already at the top of recent changes, the first item in the utilities section. - 16:53, Dec 18, 2004 (UTC)

Printer Friendly?

Has there been any consideration about adding a feature where a user could view a printer-friendly version of wikipedia articles? --ZekeMacNeil 19:39, 12 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Viewing? There's already printer CSS that your browser should select automatically when printing. -- Cyrius|✎ 19:57, 12 Dec 2004 (UTC)

If you just want to view it, use your browser's Print Preview command. Catherine\^talk 18:46, 13 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Wikipedia already has this. Just select "Printable version"; at least with the skin I use, this is a link that you can select near the top. You can also access the printable version directly through funky URLs, like this:

http://en.wiki.x.io/w/wiki.phtml?title=Fischer_Random_Chess&printable=yes

Dwheeler 02:11, 2004 Dec 18 (UTC)

Wikidemia

(Moved to Wikipedia:Village pump (news) Paul August ☎ 20:50, Dec 17, 2004 (UTC))

Image upload template

I am new to Wikipedia, only in the last few months. I am a professional image editor. I would like to help out with image correction and enhancement for some of the photographs that are posted. Is there any way that an upload template could be made that a layperson can understand. Something with dropdowns, or fill in the blanks. I have read the tutorial, but, it seems that part way through it becomes a foreign language. Another thought would be to have a page, or someplace, that anyone that has an image with a problem could post it to and make a note of what they would like changed so that anyone with the ability can download, alter the image and repost altered image.--Jocsboss 05:33, 30 Dec 2004 (UTC)Jocsboss

Good idea - I'd also be willing to help fixing some pictures if such a proposal is taken up (I use Photoshop a lot in my profession as an artist, and have already improved a few photos for Wikipedians). Grutness|^hello? 12:41, 30 Dec 2004 (UTC)

"Uncategorised" category

Is there any way technically to create a list or category of all the articles which haven't been assigned to categories? It would make it a lot easier to track down what still needs to be categorised! Grutness|^hello? 05:20, 30 Dec 2004 (UTC)

See Special:Uncategorizedpages. Peter O. (Talk, automation script) 17:32, Dec 30, 2004 (UTC)

CiteSources template and Missing Citations category

Moved to Wikipedia_talk:Cite_sources

Wikipedia biases

I think Wikipedia needs a general disclaimer on all Palestine/Israel-related issues, like The majority of the editors on Israel-Palestine issues have a strong bias and all readers are requested to make independent conclusions, cross-check information themselves and best of all, avoid reading these pages for authoritative information very importantly, not take offense at the presentation of historical facts on these pages. This will stop the more conscientious editors from stressing over every moronic agenda-based edit that mutates Wikipedia every few moments and focus on articles they can actually make progress on. -- Simonides 01:24, 27 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I don't think this disclaimer would stop anybody from stressing over anything; quite the opposite, in fact. I think a lot of editors would disagree with the statement that they have a "strong bias". (Only their opponents are biased!) Also, I question the utility to readers, since anyone who wants to read about Israel/Palestine is probably well aware of the POV swamp they are wading into. --Redquark 21:15, 27 Dec 2004 (UTC)

More on Banning and Blocking

On this lovely Xmas morning I'm sitting here reading through all the various pagtes on the subject of reverting vandalism and blocking IP-only users where they run through a number of articles in quick succession. One thing I haven't found suggested (although it may be archived 'way back when' somewhere) is that instead of blocking *all* users with that IP address the software first checks whether the user is logged in, and so only blocks non-logged in users at that IP address. (AIUI valid users will currently also be blocked when an IP is banned). Workable? --Vamp:Willow 12:20, 25 Dec 2004 (UTC)

This has often been proposed; I would think it was not technically difficult, but it has never been pursued. -- Jmabel | Talk 21:02, Dec 25, 2004 (UTC)

I wouldn't underestimate vandals. They currently don't log out because it doesn't help. If it did, they would just log out and continue their vandalizing. If you don't buy this, look at how many vandals change their IP after being IP-banned. Deco 06:53, 26 Dec 2004 (UTC)

But that is the point! When we block a proxy / ISP-NAT'd IP we stop all users at that address, not just the non-registered/logged-in ones. If we let people who are logged in carry on editing (and they can always be individually blocked anyway) then blocking an IP becomes effective in stopping anons but permitting well-bahaved registered users. win-win! --Vamp:Willow 00:29, 27 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Footnotes, endnotes and bibliography

^1 There is now a simple and effective footnote implementation working on Wikipedia. An example has been set up on Wikipedia:Footnote2 and it is also fully working on MBTI.

Our goal is to encourage wikipedians to use footnotes/endnotes 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, and to allow the writer to expand upon important points without interrupting the flow of the work. We hope to create articles that are so well backed up by footnotes and sources that wikipedia articles might be afforded the same degree of trust that readers now give to Journal articles and books.² --soren9580 and --Alterego18:37, 21 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Or you could use my idea, which is simpler yet and interrupts even less :) Fredrik | talk 18:42, 21 Dec 2004 (UTC)

^2 Hi Fredrik! We should work together on this and come up with something good. One thing I would say though is in reply to this point on your proposal: Adding notes and inline links everywhere in articles only adds clutter. I don't think it adds clutter! Take a look at that article on the MBTI. It looks very 'professionally cited (needs more citations though) Sorry I misinterpreted your point :)³ --Alterego 18:55, 21 Dec 2004 (UTC)

^3 Also, did you see how this one is already working? It doesn't get much simpler than that ;) (see the start of this topic and click the ¹. It's just two little template commands in the article, {{fn|1}} and {{fnb|1}}⁴ --Alterego 18:58, 21 Dec 2004 (UTC)

This does look like an excellent solution for footnotes. My primary concern is that although footnotes work great if you have 20 of them in one article, they certainly become impractical when you have one note for each sentence, which may very well be necessary if you intend to add specific references for every fact. -- Fredrik | talk 19:12, 21 Dec 2004 (UTC)

^4 Okay, let me see if that is addressable. Our dream is that footnotes work like this. I am typing out a sentence in an article, and need to add a footnote, so I finish my sentence. {{#|Ripley's Believe it or Not (1973). ''This is now my footnote''.}}. And I continue on with my article. The software would then automatically number the footnotes and put them at the end of the article, wherever you have placed the {{Footnote}} template command. From that point, users could have a preference as to surf Wikipedia with or without footnotes. And to make editing the footnotes easier, there could be section editing for the automatically created ==Notes== section, which gathers all the footnotes from the article and puts them in an ordered list. We also hope that simultaneous Notes and Bibliography sections can become the status quo, so that users alphabetize items, including web links, in MLA style in their bibliography. It looks very professional. I know we have the template {{Book reference|Author= |Year= |Title= |Publisher= |ID=ISBN }}, but it's not flexible and is cumbersome. perhaps something built into a page on mediawiki such as I have on my website here would be an easier solution, since it automatically creates the output for users.⁵--[[[User:Alterego|Alterego]] 19:26, 21 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Well... that would require a lot of additions to the software. I don't think the complexity, both in code and the editing procedure, would be worth it. Neither am I a big fan of the thought of having the software modify the wikitext.

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)

Here is a List of featured articles with no references at all created by Taxman. The system I have now works and it's really easy, but automated numbering would make it that much easier. --Alterego 21:37, 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 Wikipedia:Cite_sources. So what purpose in pock-marking articles with footnote numbers?

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.

--Soren9580 05:15, 22 Dec 2004 (UTC)

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)

Wikipedian categories

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)

WikiAtlas?

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 Image:Kurgan map.png is based on a Xerox mapserver map). How about starting a WikiAtlas project that somehow links to all geographical WP articles? There is probably not enough CPU resources to generate maps dynamically, but if we had an application that could generate maps from vector data, we could still make a large collection of ready made maps, and illustrate the location of all these little town stubs. 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, NASA 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): Benton Township (US community), Diplolaemus (biology [genus]), First aid (health care), Koblenz, Switzerland (community), Orvar-Odd (Icelandic mythology), Puffer train (CA) (mathematics), Winx Club (TV series), G.I. Generation (history of US people), Belgaum (community-India), Dipole magnet (physics), Illinois Central Railroad (transportation), USS Hawkins (DD-873) (military history), St. Ann's School (education), Hepa ("bogus SI prefix"), Rock County (US community), Juelz Santana (musician), Matthew Carnahan (TV crew), List of geological features on 951 Gaspra (astronomy), Walkerton, Ontario (community-Canada), Dillinger (musician). Niteowlneils 00:31, 28 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Library

Heya all,

WP:Lib is a cool idea to pool our resources of books together and ask those with the material if they can help us verify facts, sources, etc. However, I was thinking we could use templates or transclude pages. Here's an idea I came up with:

Church History in Plain Language
Shelly, Bruce L. (1995). Nashville:Thomas Nelson Publishers. ISBN 0-8499-3861-9.
Owners Ta bu shi da yu	Notes Ta bu shi da yu: Originally written by Bruce Shelley for his Bible College students, this book is a review of Church history from the book of Acts to the present day. I tend to find that the end bit focuses too much on American Christian history too much, and it skims over certain things (like the Anabaptists) but overall it's a really solid book if you are just looking for the main story of the history of the church.

My idea is to make it more participatory. People get a chance to give their opinion of the reference material and fiction books they have at hand. This will help kick off the Library! After all, if one gets to hold forth on their opinion of something and we suspend NPOV on that bit, then I'm sure we'll all of a sudden get more people adding there books. However, I would suggest that we enforce a rule that says that all criticism/praise must have details why they have come to their conclusion.

What do people think? I'd appreciate it if people replied on the talk page of WP:Lib :-) - Ta bu shi da yu 11:46, 6 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Are you aware the [[Category:Sources]] has 6155 entries (Thanks Eric Zachte for the database query) in it already? And there are probably other books, journal articles etc that haven't been appropriately tagged. By all means create a list of books in the Wikipedia:Library; but it would be nice if each book is created as a wikipedia link, because that will encourage the creation of a stub.

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)

Duplication of categories for requested articles

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)

Featured Articles

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 WP:FARC easier. Smoddy | Talk 14:54, 4 Jan 2005 (UTC)

This has been discussed before at Wikipedia talk:Featured articles and Wikipedia_talk:Featured_article_candidates/archive1#Brilliant_prose. One of the oft-cited reasons seems to do with no having 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)

File:Featurednichalp.png

person template

along the lines of "semantic Wikipedia", de: has de:Wikipedia:Personendaten, i.e. a template with 'machine readable' person data. Very useful for compiling Categories, lists etc. It would be nice to have something similar (also, a corresponding geographic template with coordinates, to help implement "Wikiatlas"). dab (ᛏ) 10:21, 2 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Earthquake disaster

I live in Bangkok,Thailand and I have been going around hospitals in the past two days to help where I can. I have seen people totally destroyed listened to people whom miss family members and friends. Tomorrow (Jan 1st) I will be going to Phuket and Krabi to help somebody find a familymember as I speak the language and now the country, I am also taking pictures with me of familymembers of people I have visited in hospitals.

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)

Regular running bots for identifying common misspellings and dead links

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 Wikipedia:List of common misspellings? Niteowlneils 03:51, 3 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Featured Images

I did a serie of small images to be an icon for Featured Articles. What it means:

• 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-IE browsers like Mozilla Firefox (using min-height: 60px; in the CSS). I also reworded the text to get rid of ugly whitespace (and I think the new text is better anyway; it wasn't that clear what the "that page" in the old text referred to). Here's what it looks like:

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)

having people on "standby" for trivial news updates

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)

Why not Book Reviews?

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)

Section numbering

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)

Literary criticism?

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)

Feedback needed for an automatic edit hint system

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)

Wikipedia:Sources

OK, it appears that Wikipedia:Library might not be the most appropriate place to have my sources. I've made a more specific article that shows sources, who owns them and notes on those sources. What do people think? - Ta bu shi da yu 05:07, 7 Jan 2005 (UTC)

A proposal to create a wikipedia annotated Bible

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?

Example User

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)

High risk status for pages

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)

WikiRecipes

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

Auto Translation

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)

a great idea. .

FILTERS FOR 'RANDOM PAGE' BY SUBJECT(broad and specific)!!

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. dab (ᛏ) 19:43, 14 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Archive proposal

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.

Archive 1 Contents [hide] 1 content1 2 content2 n content...

Archive 2 Contents [hide] 1 content1 2 content2 n content...

Archive 3 Contents [hide] 1 content1 2 content2 n content...

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)

Login bars

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)

-- to —

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)

Category counting

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)

Remind people to cite sources while editing

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 Dwheeler, citing sources is enormously important for fact checking articles and helping the reader know that what they are reading is reputable. It also allows readers to find more detail on the article if they are trying to research it. Adding a one line note to cite your sources would take very little space, it'd be easy to implement, and it would remind everyone that when they add factual information to an article, they should cite their sources. --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)

wikiannotations

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)

Improving the backup system

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

Linking users among different language wiki

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)

Polygon articles

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 octagon should be merged and re-directed to polygon. Add a degree column to the polygon table telling the angular measure of a regular polygon in degrees. (Note: this was brought to my attention when I saw a preparation of a page move of Enneagon.) As for the usage of enneagon/nonagon, it is already mentioned at the bottom of the Greek numerical prefixes article. Any objections to this merge?? Georgia guy 00:20, 15 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Contributions count

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, User:Kate had developed a tool that counted them automatically, but that tool is no longer online. Before that, and now again, people just counted manually. 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 WP:RFA. My way is to copy the final page of listings into Excel and let it count the lines. There could be another way, increasing the offset in the URL, but the Ecxel method is quickest, IMO. Smoddy | 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. Smoddy | Talk 16:47, 16 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Article structuring

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)

Generic image names (i.e., no file extension)

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)

Redirect Alert

I propose that there should be a "redirect alert".

This could simply be a weekly check of page access counts to identify any redirect-page that counts for nearly 50% (say 35% +) of the total accesses to the article being re-directed to.

This would allow a automated means to identify any article that should be listed for consideration of a title change. This would be especially usefull for obtuse subjects whose titles have become subjected to edit wars; as it would clarify which English name the Internet community most commonly knows the subject as in accord with existing Wikipedia naming policy.

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.?

New project proposal - Wikibuilder

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

MediaWiki:Sharedupload

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 article

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. Smoddy | 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)

Rating buttons

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)

Direct link from "watch list" to article's history

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)

More automated vandalism

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)

Change category link at bottom of articles

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 Categories page. That page is just an unformatted list of every category in alphabetical order. A better page for it to link to would be Wikipedia:Browse. What do you think of this proposal? --kenb215 02:01, Jan 18, 2005 (UTC)

Practically anything would be better than linking to Special:Categories, which is practically useless. Wikipedia:Browse would be an improvement. (Perhaps 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)

wikitranslations

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 Confucius, 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) ~

PDFs of tutorials etc

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

Hong Kong notice board

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)

Edit Display Mode for links

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

An example of this tag might look like stones(disamb) or perhaps Earthworks(stub).

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)

add a new option

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)

The Names of People

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)

"Hide logged-in users" in Special:Newpages

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)

Protecting Wikipedia:About

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)

Proposal: Autocomplain if user doesn't enter an edit summary

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)

Stopping Link Spam / Comment Spam

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." --Stevietheman 06:27, 20 Jan 2005 (UTC)

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)