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The proposals section of the village pump is used to discuss new ideas and proposal that are not policy related (see Wikipedia:Village pump (policy) for that).

Recurring policy proposals are discussed at Wikipedia:Village pump (perennial proposals). If you have a proposal for something that sounds overwhelmingly obvious and are amazed that Wikipedia doesn't have it, please check there first before posting it, as someone else might have found it obvious, too.

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WP:VPR

Before posting your proposal:

If the proposal is a change to the software, file a bug at Bugzilla instead. Your proposal is unlikely to be noticed by a developer unless it is placed there.
If the proposal is a change in policy, be sure to also post the proposal to, say, Wikipedia:Manual of style, and ask people to discuss it there.
If the proposal is for a new wiki-style project outside of Wikipedia, please go to m:Proposals for new projects and follow the guidelines there. Please do not post it here. These are different from WikiProjects.

Proposals archive

Discussions older than 7 days (date of last made comment) are moved here. These discussions will be kept archived for 7 more days. During this period the discussion can be moved to a relevant talk page if appropriate. After 7 days the discussion will be permanently removed.

Annotation

Soliciting comments on Meta about m:Annotation. Essentially, once implemented, it will be a tool that will let you view the wikitext of any article and see who wrote what and when (on a word by word basis). There are a few crucial interface issues that need to be resolved, no developing experience necessary! Please comment. — Ambush Commander^(Talk) 21:32, 12 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Awww... :-( No one cares about annotation. Maybe I should look for something else to implement. — Ambush Commander^(Talk) 03:11, 16 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I care! I think it would be awesome. It's very time consuming at the moment to locate the editor that first added a certain piece of text. I'm afraid I just don't have much else to say about it except, er, good idea. :-) Deco 04:06, 16 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I'm so glad someone answered! Yay! So, if you were to use the Annotation tool, you'd have a specific piece of text on the page that you'd want to look up. You (somehow) enter it in, and then the site tells you who did what. A few questions: how exactly would you plan to tell the software exactly what fragments you wanted to check? And also, if the fragment contained more than one author, how would you expect the software to show it to you? — Ambush Commander^(Talk) 04:47, 16 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I made a mockup for you of the way I imagine it:

The text is automatically segmented into portions. The blue portions are those written by a single editor, while the yellow subportions are based on the edits of two editors. Hovering the mouse over a portion shows some info, much like a mixture of history and diffs, detailing changes to that specific portion. "bunnys" looks bolded in the first change, but it's not supposed to be. If I hovered over "But also evil" I would see DcoetzeeBot's edit adding that phrase with that part of his diff (which is not included when I hover over the other part). Just a concept. Deco 07:36, 16 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Forgive me if I seem overly argumentative, but here goes. You may want to reconsider your coloring scheme: as it stands, there's no way to tell apart where one contribution ends and another starts. Furthermore, segmented changes as you display will likely never happen, because the WordLevelDiff we use on Wikipedia is on a word level (as you show in the diffs between the versions). Also, note that pulling diffs is a costly process, and we probably wouldn't be able to (for performance issues), pull 'em all out at once.

Making something like that will require JavaScript, a language that I am not most proficient in. If someone can write code that would display metadata in a little hovering popup box, that would be swell. — Ambush Commander^(Talk) 00:17, 18 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Well, there are small gaps between sections, but alternating colours would make it more obvious. As for being infeasible, well, yes - I like to start with ideal and scale back to feasible. :-) I'll be happy with anything that lets me point at a chunk of text and see all the details of the edits that modified it. Admittedly you do have a Ship of Theseus problem - when does a chunk of text stop becoming one thing and become another new chunk? - but in practice I think most chunks of text start out their lives by being written by a single person and largely remain the same thereafter (if they stick around). Deco 06:17, 21 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Hey, I just follow what the diffing algorithm does. We'll see what happens if we manage to get this working and then tweak the expected behavior. — Ambush Commander^(Talk) 03:19, 26 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

It's an exciting idea, Edward; I look forward to seeing how you work out the details. I don't know how you will decide where to start the annotating process -- not all bits of text will have a clear "starting place" in the revision history. But those details are yours to sort out -- you're asking about input and output

Ideally, I'd want to be able to click-and-drag to select text, then hit a button or choose a command from a right-click menu to submit that text to the tool. Given that there's no other click-and-drag function on Wikipedia (yet), the next best thing would be to be able to copy and paste a selection into a text box -- perhaps something down below the "Save Page" buttons and such, or in a pop-up window or new window or tab.

It's hard to visualize the output (which is why you're asking, I'm sure). I see perhaps three options. The first would break the output into color-coded rows based on editor. The second would be the same, sorted by date of edit instead of order of text (eek, sounds confusing). Something like this:

Text: The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.

Text	Editor	Date/Time (sort by)	Edit summary
The	added by User:CatherineMunro	June 14, 2003	Brevity is wit.
quick brown	added by User:Ambush Commander	April 15, 2004	Adjectives are good for the soul.
fox jumped over the	added by User:CatherineMunro	June 14, 2003	Brevity is wit.
lazy	added by User:Ambush Commander	April 22, 2004	Forgot an adjective
dog.	added by User:CatherineMunro	June 14, 2003	Brevity is wit.

The third option would be more like a sequence of diffs, sorted by date. With a large text this could obviously get quite long and complex. (Having spent the time to lay this out, I like this one better.)

Edit	Editor	Date/Time	Edit summary
The fox jumped over the dog.	added by User:CatherineMunro	June 14, 2003	Brevity is wit.
The quick brown fox jumped over the dog.	added by User:Ambush Commander	April 15, 2004	Adjectives are good for the soul.
The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.	added by User:Ambush Commander	April 22, 2004	Forgot an adjective

I'm sure there are other ways, but that's what I've come up with so far. This doesn't deal with the subtleties of deletions, reversions, spelling corrections and such; it would just show the most recent editor to be responsible for a given word or phrase. Who gets credit/blame for a word if a later editor only adds a missing letter? Would there be any way to tell that there had been a previous editor who inserted that word?

I think it would be a necessity to provide links to the actual revisions or diffs to allow people to explore history more thoroughly, and to explain how the mechanism works so that faulty attributions are harder to make.

Let me know what you think. — Catherine\^talk 07:19, 16 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Before that, I have to think. Both of you presented things that I immediately dismissed as impossible when I started thinking about it, which means I'm in a rut, which means I need to think. Feel free to incorporate your ideas onto m:Annotation. — Ambush Commander^(Talk) 02:32, 17 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Catherine, regarding your question about how to track the text bits, it's a legitimate question and took me a bit of thinking to figure out. But it's not really a problem. :-)

Once again, using JavaScript, the click-n-drag idea would become possible. Editors would probably object to that sort of thing on the actual article, so there would likely be (for this implementation), a seperate Annotation screen. It displays the wikitext (nothing more, because there's things that don't get rendered easily) and lets you select a piece. Then, the JavaScript would calculate the slice of the annotation that you would want served back.

Handling the text in a list-like fashion presents essentially one problem: you sacrifice readability of the wikitext. Otherwise, it's a fine way to cram in all the metadata without resorting to JavaScript.

The sequence of diffs, however, defeats the purpose of annotation, because there's no way to look and say "He wrote that".

Regarding your last two questions, they are very important. The WordLevelDiffer regards a single letter addition as a change to an entire word, so it will get assigned to the new person. We could, however, make note that there was previous text before it. It also would be beneficial to show where things got deleted, like showing stylized Ds that simply notify that something was there, but it's gone now.

Faulty annotations are quite possible, esp. in the case of reversions and edit warring. Good help text would be necessary too. — Ambush Commander^(Talk) 00:17, 18 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

On the issue of dealing with reverts: how about you add a "reversion to version X" flag to page versions? If someone saved an out-of-date version of a page, the software could check the diff of those two versions, and if it turned out to be zero, the flag would be added. It would also, of course, be added to every admin rollback. This wouldn't be that computationally expensive (you could even drop the diff part, really), and your annotation thingy could just skip any edits that were reverted in figuring out who did what. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 03:44, 28 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Funding the Wikipedia through selling DVDs

What about selling the Wikipedia written on CDs or DVDs so that everyone who wants, could have his/her own Wikipedia without the need to surf at wikipedia.org {especially now it would be quite needed, because the servers of Wikipedia are overcrowded and it takes several seconds-minutes to upload a page}. Also by selling such DVDs, CDs {with encouragement to copy them and establish on your own servers} could be some money raised. Or even better, such CDs or DVDs would be given to the supporters of Wikipedia or could be sold for symbolic price to the supporters. Of course there is an issue how to make such a CD/DVD, in which languages, which articles should be taken into and which not, how many CDs/DVDs would be needed for 1 000 000 articles {with photos, sound files, etc}.

But on the other hand, I haven't heard about Wikipedia CDs/DVDs so I think it would need some kind of research to get to know if it is commercially realizable {maybe, I alone am in need of such CDs/DVDs :) }.

The German Wikipedia has one already. --cesarb 21:55, 16 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Why would anyone buy an instantly-out-of-date CD or DVD (which is bound to have bits of frozen vandalism in it). Would you even look at it, or just put it on your shelf? T-shirts or mugs would make more sense. Text ads would make even more sense... nobody boycotts an otherwise indispensible resource just because of a few unobtrusive text ads (how many of you have stopped using Google?). -- Curps 22:25, 16 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I wouldn't be bothered by Adsense. Why? Because my Firefox extensions block it automatically. And people could still choose to view the ads (by using a browser which doesn't have an adblocking capability, or by turning it off) and support the project in that way if they didn't wish to support it by donating their time.Cynical 21:53, 18 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

IIRC, the German DVD was combed before hand to make it publisizeable, removing all vandalism and such, and also limiting the size of it by removing stub articles etc. And what to use with it? Well, there probably are quite a lot of coauthors that actually would want one on the shelf. Also, imagine offline browsing? Not even in Europe everybody has broadband internet connections. Now think about the third world and consider the possibilities - especially considering that one of Wikipedia's goals, according to Jimbo at least, is

"Wikipedia is first and foremost an effort to create and distribute a free encyclopedia of the highest possible quality to every single person on the planet in their own language."

In today's world, doing that distribution online is not possible. DVDs wouldn't really cut it either (limited computer availability), but at least it's a bit better. TERdON 01:15, 17 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah the German DVD sold pretty well, but it was done by a private company that only donated some portion of the proceeds. Basically to do it for English it would take a group to organize the vetting, a lot of time to do that, and somebody that had the ability to produce and sell it. The other problem of course is the space it would take up. According to Carnildo's post on the reference desk just the text from current revisions of the English Wikipedia is 8Gb and images add another 76GB or so. So a text-only version could fit on one dual layer or two single layer DVDs, but adding images would spread it to about 9 dual layer discs. So it's a good idea, just someone has to spearhead it and make it happen. - Taxman ^Talk 20:35, 22 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Fine then. Put text ads on Wikipedia, which given our Alexa numbers should raise, oh, a million dollars a month. But make it clear upfront that half of the windfall will be spent for third-world charitable purposes. Spend some of the rest on servers and also hire several more developers, so badly needed bug fixes and enhancements can happen a lot quicker. Everybody's happy.

I'm not sure I buy into the third-world story though. For most places in the third world, your CD or DVD will just be a frisbee, due to lack of computers or a reliable electrical power grid. And the places that have the latter two will almost certainly have telecom connectivity for Internet too. In fact, in many places telecom infrastructure is being created before any computing or electrical grid infrastructure: in Africa, cell phones are booming (they get recharged from car batteries). -- Curps 05:14, 17 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I agree that CD and DVD editions for English Wikipedia are a good idea. I would also remind Curps that plenty of Wikipedia users are staunchly against ads. I and many other contributors would immediately fork. Superm401 - Talk 04:33, 17 February 2006 (UTC) (adding back in comment removed without explanation by User:Thsgrn Superm401 - Talk 22:17, 18 February 2006 (UTC))[reply]

You can't run a top 25 website on a shoestring. The current MediaWiki software is inadequate in many ways and the pace of bugfixing and upgrades is far too slow. Objections to text ads can be easily met: just let anyone who can edit semi-protected articles turn off text ads in their preferences page. -- Curps 08:17, 19 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I disagree. We already are running it on a "shoestring" (if that's what you call hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations). The MediaWiki software is adequate; otherwise, you wouldn't be seeing this post and we wouldn't have 900,000 articles. I think you mean it's not satisfactory, and I disagree with even that. The reason I object to Wikipedia serving text ads is not because I don't want to see them. I already block all google ads and can block even a completely plain text ad using greasemonkey. However, I refuse to provide free content to a site that is showing ads to anyone. Superm401 - Talk 23:29, 19 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I've got news for you: you already are. You do understand the nature of the GFDL? Reference.com is about 130 on Alexa, they mirror our content and put banner ads on it. Same for all the other mirrors out there, especially the ones that work the art of high Google ranking. -- Curps 02:24, 20 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

This developer is of the opinion that current fundraising methods are more than sufficient to meet the needs of hosting all of the projects the Foundation is hosting without compromising the ethical position of the projects with ads, which already caused a major fork of the hosting and then content of the Spanish language project. Of course, if a different foundation wanted to do things like sell DVDs to raise money to do things like donate computers with Wikipedia on them to the poor, that would also be a good thing and an act I'd be happy to support. Likely fundraising this year is in the million dollars range and that's more than ample. If you want to produce such a DVD, please do feel free to do so - it's your right under the license all of us authors are granting. You're entirely welcome to donate all the funds from that activity to the Foundation or anyone else. Jamesday 17:27, 27 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

On the "access for Africa" theme, while what Curps says is true about wireless telecoms overtaking electrical grid infrastructure, for broadband you actually need cable (at least to the neighbourhood). That's a bottleneck for the millions in towns who have electricity (at least part of the time). Even where there are telecoms cables, increasing capacity to meaningfully accommodate non-voice uses is a long way off. Check out Freedom Toaster for good description of challenges and solutions. JackyR 16:45, 21 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

1,000,000 logo

1,000,000 articles is coming up fast and IMO it'd be nice to change the logo for this very special occasion. Here is a very rough mockup of an idea I had for the logo:

File:Wiki1m.png

Noclip 02:13, 17 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I like this logo Gerard Foley 17:53, 17 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Very nice! I'd go one stage further and suggest 10,000 and 100,000 variants on it that can be used by other-language WPs when they reach major targets. Grutness...wha? 01:00, 18 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I like it. As said, could be done for other languages. Sceptr e ^(Talk) 10:59, 18 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

It's an impressive number, to be sure, but I wouldn't celebrate it the wrong way. 1,000,000 what, exactly? --Tsavage 23:38, 18 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

At present account creation rates, it will be our millionth registered user before our millionth article :( Physchim62 (talk) 07:52, 19 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Not to be a wet blanket or anything but that really celebrates quantity as opposed to quality. A modest acknowledgment would be appropriate and would also show us to be above the billions sold crowd. hydnjo talk 19:52, 19 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Mozilla celebrates milestones like this. And not all of those downloads will be unique. Compu te r Jo e 22:04, 24 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

MediaWiki:Editingold proposal

A few editors have expressed an interest in making this notice more visible, please see the current version at [MediaWiki:Editingold]] and a proposed version at MediaWiki talk:Editingold. Please comment at the talk page. xaosflux ^Talk/_CVU 03:11, 17 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Only slightly related: Would it make sense to force or at least suggest an automatic edit summary that contains "edited old version" whenever you do that? Kusma (討論) 18:08, 17 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

The new box has been implemented. Please report any issues at the Talk Page. Kusma, that sounds like a good idea, looking in to it more. xaosflux ^Talk/_CVU 01:19, 21 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

1,000,000 articles

Will it be any milestone commemoration to mark 1 million articles reaching achievement? :) Brandmeister 16:07, 19 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

As of this time, there are less than 19,000 articles to go before this exciting number. I'm trying to see if I can find out the actual day for this number. Georgia guy 18:04, 19 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
[1] and [2] might be of use for this. Kevin Baas^talk 18:31, 19 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Assuming an exponential growth, and using the data from [3], using 10 samples from dec 2002 to dec 2005, I calculated that the article count on day x equals the article count on day (x-1) times 1.002035629... Thus, at 981.388k articles at about 1pm on Feb. 19th, I calculate that wikipedia will reach 1,000,000 articles on March 1st. (999.5k on feb 28th 1pm, 1001.5k on march 1st 1pm) Kevin Baas^talk 19:03, 19 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Scratch that, 7pm on feb 28th. But activity is peeks at about 6pm, so i'm going to skew that to 6pm Feb 28th, that's Central Standard Time (GMT -06:00). Kevin Baas^talk 19:22, 19 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Using 26 samples from [4] Dec 2003 to January 2006, resulting in a day-multiplier of 1.002110584..., starting at 1:30 on Jan 19th, I calculate reaching 1,000,000 articles at 11am on Feb 28th, again, (GMT -0:600). Kevin Baas^talk 19:45, 19 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Don't forget to expect a brief surge of articles as soon as we get within spitting distance of 1m; I wouldn't be surprised if a few editors have a couple of dozen short articles drafted and ready to post to give them a good shot at getting page #1,000,000... Shimgray | talk | 20:32, 19 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah I got a few articles ready to go for one million --Jaranda ^{wat's sup} 04:33, 20 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I've refined my calculations: I weighted each month's multiplicative difference (month x+1 / month x) by an exponentially increasing factor (*1.01 per month), to take into account logarithmic decay in informativeness, and started at the sample closest to the predicted end time of day (1:00pm), to compensate for variances throughout the day. My refined estimate comes to 12:00pm. At that time there's about 86 new articles an hour. So depending on how big one considers that surge to be, one can make their own adjustments. Kevin Baas^talk 20:54, 19 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

On closer analysis, there's an anomaly in the monthly difference of the natural log of the article count, on feb. and march of 2004:

And before then, that quantity is consistently lower. So I've refined my calculations to use only data past march 2004 (starting april 2004). This puts the arrival time much later, at around 6pm on Feb 28th. Kevin Baas^talk 21:39, 19 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

With activity generally peaking around 6:00, and an expectation of a surge in article count around 1m, I'm willing to gamble $50 on 17:25 +/- 15 minutes (GMT -06:00). Kevin Baas^talk 22:17, 19 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

So anyway, getting back to the initial question, what sort of "ceremony" will happen at 1,000,000? Great work on all this extrapolation, Kevin, and I don't think it really matters if you use AM, PM, 24hr, or a sun dial. JHMM13 (T | C)

22:53, 19 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I'm sure we'll put a banner up, but that's about it. Probably some press releases too (as if anyone would resspond to them at this point, there has been way too much news about wiki as of late). Do you have any suggestions? Broken Segue 05:06, 20 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Doesn't look like there's going to be a press release unless some people decide to go start one. Wikipedia:Press releases would be the place to coordinate it at. Though I'm sure hitting 1 million articles is going to get picked up in the press whether we have a press release or not. - Taxman ^Talk 19:27, 22 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Kevin: I don't want to be a dick, but I think you should use 24-hour clock instead of 12-hour clock. _→AzaToth 22:23, 19 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Let's stop it at 999,999 and ruminate. Lotsofissues 06:11, 20 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I heartily endorse this idea. - Randwicked Alex B 13:54, 21 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Article referer

I previously posted this to the help desk, hoping this feature was already available, but it looks like it's not.

Suppose I read a Wikipedia article A. I open a link from A to another article B, in a different browser tab (or window), then I close A. Later, after reading other stuff, I go to the other tab and read article B, and I forgot how and why I got there (especially when a redirect and/or pipe is involved). Is there a way to use the http referer field (or some other means) for giving me a link back to the article where I "came from" (A in this case)?

There are actually two ways I can suggest for accomplishing this. One is actually using the "Referer" http header, possibly checking that it's a Wikipedia article. Another one is adding a reference to the current article in the querystring for every link (e.g. the link from Wikipedia to encyclopedia could use a URL like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclopedia?referer=Wikipedia). I would prefer the first approach.

Either way, I suggest that the link should be placed in the toolbox on the left side on every page.

Aditsu 18:18, 20 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

In the meantime, you can use Special:Whatlinkshere/Article, and scour the list manually. -Splash^talk 22:54, 20 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Still, nobody expressed an opinion about this proposal. aditsu 07:17, 22 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Frankly, this seems ludicrous to me. Your back button does this just fine, and you thwarted it. This is a ubiquitous client function and few other websites supply explicit backlinks. It might be interesting to get a list of articles you visited recently, but you have History for that... Deco 08:14, 27 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

If you have a browser sufficiently sophisticated to use tabs (i.e., not IE), you can undo closed tabs. It's built in to Opera, and you can get an extension for Firefox (I use Tab Mix Plus). —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 03:17, 28 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Removing "disclaimers" from Template:GFDL

A long time ago (February 2004), someone added "Subject to disclaimers" to {{GFDL}}. Because the GFDL mandates that any disclaimers posted with a copyright notice must be preserved, it has been the considered legal opinion of Wikipedia that this disclaimer notice cannot be removed from any image on which it has been applied. (See for example: Template_talk:GFDL#Subject_to_disclaimers.21.3F).

However, the notice would appear to imply that anyone reusing the image must provide not only a full copy of the GFDL text but also a copy of Wikipedia:General disclaimer and all its subpages. This situation is at best awkward and significantly compounds the amount of material that a print reuser would be required to provide, thus making our GFDL images less free by imposing a greater burden on reusers. Note that neither Commons, nor any other Wikipedia (to my knowledge) has such a disclaimer notice in their copyright template. In particular Commons has been forced to create both Commons:Template:GFDL and Commons:Template:GFDL-en so as to have a special GFDL template that preserves our disclaimer notice, which is just plain dumb and compounds the risk that images migrated to Commons will be incorrectly categorized.

I would like to put an end to the further propogation of this situation.

As such I proposed the following:

Create {{GFDL-no-disclaimer}} without the disclaimer statement, but with Category:GFDL images no disclaimer to distinguish them for sorting purposes.
Immediately change Mediawiki:Licenses to replace {{GFDL}} with {{GFDL-no-disclaimer}} on new uploads.
Create {{GFDL-with-disclaimer}} as a copy of the current GFDL template, but with Category:GFDL images with disclaimer to distinguish them for sorting purposes.
Have a bot replace all uses of the current {{GFDL}} with {{GFDL-with-disclaimer}}. (A long process, I'm sure.)
Once Category:GFDL images has been emptied, move {{GFDL-no-disclaimer}} to {{GFDL}}.
Reset the categories.

Obviously this won't remove the disclaimer text from the bazillion images that already have it, but it should stop that text from propagating any further. In my mind this sort of correction should have happened long ago.

Thoughts?

Dragons flight 18:31, 20 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

What does that "disclaimer" line even do, legally? Nothing on the linked page seems to change anything in the copyright arrangement that I can see (and the disclaimer notice is already at the bottom of all of our content pages as it is). Am I missing something obvious here? --Fastfission 22:23, 20 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
- The bottom of every page says that all text is subject to GFDL and disclaimers, this is about whether images should also be required to carry 5 pages of liability disclaimers whenever anyone wants to reproduce or use them. Aside from the fact that the GFDL mandates that all disclaimers be faithfully preserved, this isn't really about copyright. The disclaimers exist to avoid legal liability should someone foolishly rely upon Wikipedia and reach a negative result. It's not impossible to imagine a situation where an image might warrant disclaimers, but it would see to be such a rare circumstance that it doesn't justify appending legal/medical/etc. disclaimers to every GFDL image we have. As noted above, this is a historical quirk of this Wikipedia and apparently not mirrored by any of the other Wikimedia sites. Dragons flight 23:27, 20 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  - That seems really silly and honestly quite stupid. Wikipedia's disclaimers are, as I understand it, mostly a legal note about our content not being officially reliable. Our legal status should not come into question if someone else took that content -- which already had a disclaimer -- and then started waiving it around as being legally infallible. Our initial disclaimer should cover our butt the whole way, I imagine (if someone writes that the content is infallible, they can't attribute that sentiment to us in any case). Anyway, I agree that this disclaimers thing seems like a very silly and haphazard thing, though I don't know what the best thing to do about it is. --Fastfission 23:03, 22 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not sure if we are allowed to do that. Wikipedia:Copyrights also explicitly mentions these disclaimers. Looks like it's intentional. Lupo 09:12, 22 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

If this were some carefully considered thing, we wouldn't be the only Wikipedia that merges the disclaimers into our copyright tag. For that matter the disclaimers wouldn't look radically different from one Wikipedia to the next. Dragons flight 14:38, 22 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Maybe. Did you talk to the foundation's lawyers about this? Lupo 08:15, 23 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

The foundation doesn't exactly have lawyers (and certainly didn't in Feb. 04), but it does have a number of Wikipedians with law degrees who volunteer advice. I'll try to track down one of the old timers, but I'm fairly sure I already know the answer. Dragons flight 03:37, 26 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

The authors are the people granting the license, not the Foundation. The Foundation is already well covered by the general disclaimer and US law itself. That disclaimer was added by someone who didn't consider all the nasty implications of what they were doing. The answer form this old-timer who was commenting legally at the time that mistake was made was, as soon as I noticed it, to say that it was a bad idea and should be removed. Jamesday 17:17, 27 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I have an alternate suggestion: How about depreciating local uploads of user-created material? commons:Template:GFDL doesn't include any disclaimers, or people can use Creative Commons licenses there. JYolkowski // talk 21:51, 24 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I have gone ahead with the simple part of the plan and created {{GFDL-no-disclaimers}} and Category:GFDL images without disclaimer to use with newly uploaded images. If I am somehow wrong about all this, then these can be easily reverted/redirected (it is infinitely easier to add disclaimers back then to remove them). But then I am quite confident that it makes sense for this Wikipedia, Commons, and all the others to share the same licensing terms.

Now comes the hard part, there are only ~75000 pages to convert from {{GFDL}} to {{GFDL-with-disclaimers}} in order to free up Template:GFDL for the no disclaimers version of the tag. If there are more comments about this, now would be a good time, before the heavy lifting. Dragons flight 03:37, 26 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

That disclaimers bit was a bad mistake - it requires the disclaimers at the time the image was uploaded and also retroactively modified the license granted by the author for all GFDL images using it at the time it was added. Really lousy idea to do that and I'm glad to see you doing cleanup to undo the mess. Please do try to use the no disclaimers version for any images from before the disclaimer mistake was made, to correctly reflect the license the author granted. Jamesday 17:17, 27 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I think we need to just go ahead and depreciate the use of {{GFDL}} on enwiki in favor of getting people over to the commons. As it stand today there is an apalling amount of copyright violations tagged as {{GFDL}} on enwiki. Any proposal to fix the tagging of GFDL images on enwiki is going to have to deal with the fact that in a large number of cases the tag was added long after the image was uploaded by someone other then the uploader, who probably never even spoke with the uploader. This has happened due to a misguided line of reasoning that goes something like "If the uploader of this untagged image was the copyright holder they agreed to place it under the GFDL based on the text of our upload page, or at least intended to place it in the GFDL because Wikipedia is GFDLed. If the uploader was not the uploader they probably violated copyright law in uploading the image. Since we assume good faith, I must accept the first theory and reject the second. Thus it is okay to slap a GFDL tag on this. Q.E.D.". This has resulted in some pretty outragious violations on enwiki in this category, and any sort of mindless retagging could only make it worse. In other cases the uploader is just wrong, yet no one has called him on it and... sometimes it appears there is just wishful thinking about the identity of the copyright holder. We need a cleanup, but if we're going to do one we might as well move the images over to the commons. Commons suffers from the same kind of nonsense but its far less widespread. --Gmaxwell 05:22, 28 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Place "edit current" link in warning about not editing current?

I've just seen that the text displayed when editing a version of a page other than the current version has been changed; it now links the word "removed" to Wikipedia:Reverting and it's also in a very visible red-pink box. Well, I think this is a good idea, since from experience it was all too possible to miss the old notice when it was displayed. However, what about also extending the text to include a link to the edit page for the current revision? Perhaps change the text from:

You are editing a prior version of this page. If you save it, any changes made since this version will be removed.

to something like:

You are editing a prior version of this page. If you save it, any changes made since this version will be removed. If you want to edit the current revision instead, click here.

Here would of course have to be different for whatever the name of the page being edited was, but I can't picture that being too much of a strain on the server -- less so than if the user has to first load the current revision, then click the edit button on that page. -- Antaeus Feldspar 02:42, 21 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Please see the discussion here: MediaWiki talk:Editingold regarding the message (also note the announcement above on this page). xaosflux ^Talk/_CVU 02:59, 21 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Shortcut to this page

Please see The Talk Page regarding this prop. xaosflux ^Talk/_CVU 04:02, 21 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the info User:Flcelloguy, I've added the shortcut box to the top of this page. xaosflux ^Talk/_CVU 02:29, 22 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Template for links to POV or commercial websites

I was going through the article Progressivism. The external links section of the article has links to a number of websites which are of activist nature. I am sure there are a number of other articles also in wikipedia with the same problem. I was thinking of creating a template which warns users that these websites may be of impartial nature. This template would be a special case of Template:Disputed-section template. The text should be something like

Some of the links in this section may be commercial, activist or ~~impartial~~ biased in nature

Suggestions on alternate wording is also welcome.

I would also like to know whether any template of this nature exists currently?

--DuKot 05:28, 21 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I assume you mean biased rather than impartial (which are antonyms). I had a bit of an edit war on nocturnal emission over a link that contains a lot of inaccurate information. The final decision was to link it but provide a brief disclaimer. I think you should remove any site that is not useful for understanding the topic, but feel free to link relevant biased sites as long as you clearly state the specific bias of each one (ideally by citing an objective source). This isn't policy, but I personally feel that unqualified citation is equivalent to an assertion that "this is a good source".

Of course, I meant biased --DuKot 06:56, 21 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I do think it's important to describe each link individually though. Just to say some of these links are biased doesn't tell an uninformed reader much of anything useful about the links - they can't tell which are which. Deco 06:02, 21 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

We could have another template for this purpose which states

The following link is commercial, activist or biased in nature --DuKot 06:58, 21 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I think the word "biased" carries with it POV problems in itself. For instance, is a website that only presents one side of a debate "biased"? What about a website that fails to mention certain alternatives? For instance, what about a link to the details of the moon landing which fails to mention conspiracy theories? I think a template that says this will just become another thing that POV warriors use to cause problems. Perhaps every external link section should have a warning like: "not all external links are written in encyclopedic tone". I think this either needs to be done everywhere or only in the most extreme cases. Otherwise its just another problem. --best, kevin [kzollman][talk] 07:21, 21 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

The probem with "not every link . . ." is that it provides inadequate information. See below re set of templates.