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The idea lab section of the village pump is a place where new ideas or suggestions on general Wikipedia issues can be incubated, for later submission for consensus discussion at Village pump (proposals). Try to be creative and positive when commenting on ideas.
Before creating a new section, please note:

Discussions of technical issues belong at Wikipedia:Village pump (technical).
Discussions of policy belong at Wikipedia:Village pump (policy).
If you're ready to make a concrete proposal and determine whether it has consensus, go to the Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals). Proposals worked out here can be brought there.

Before commenting, note:

This page is not for consensus polling. Stalwart "Oppose" and "Support" comments generally have no place here. Instead, discuss ideas and suggest variations on them.
Wondering whether someone already had this idea? Search the archives below, and look through Wikipedia:Perennial proposals, and Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Persistent proposals.

« Archives, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58

The aim of the Village pump (idea lab) is to encourage the preliminary incubation of new ideas in a "non-polling" environment. When you have a new idea, it is not mandatory that you post it here first. However, doing so can be useful if you only have a general conception of what you want to see implemented, and would like the community's assistance in devising the specifics. Once ideas have been developed, they can be presented to the community for consensus discussion at Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals).

The formation of this page, and the question of its purpose and existence, are the subjects of discussion on the talk page. Direct all comments on those topics there.

Encouraging school teachers to get their pupils to contribute

This is probably not a new idea. Please forgive me if so, and also please forgive me (and not bite me too hard) if I have misunderstood how this page is supposed to be used. However, I have long pondered (decades even before the days of Wikipedia) how much valuable human effort is expended, and later discarded, by pupils and students in examination halls and coursework exercises. Could school teachers (and university lecturers) be encouraged to get their best pupils and students to upload their work to Wikipedia, as and where appropriate. As a starting point, a class might be asked to research and write a biography of a little-known but notable person. To the teacher, the subject of the biography is just a vehicle, and irrelevent to the exercise. To the pupil, the subject of the biography is what sparks their interest (writing a biography of a little-known but notable chemist might be what is needed to get a chemistry-orientated pupil involved in writing an essay for the English teacher). To both, the fact that the subject is little-known (and a stub on Wikipedia) means that the student cannot just copy-paste from the internet, but has to put in some scholarly effort.

OK, there would have to be checks and safeguards in place. But this is true of all articles on Wikipedia anyway. A teacher who persistently allows substandard articles to be submitted could be warned, and eventually blocked, in the usual way.

There are just so many biography stubs, to stay with this example, that surely any effort to get the article started is to be welcomed. Having been started, it is then easier for later editors to improve on it. That's just my thoughts. TheAMmollusc (talk) 11:30, 8 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Recommend reading Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2008-05-09/Dispatches. The general consensus is that writing for Wikipedia is much harder than any essay assignment or research report and the skill set don't overlap with anything learned up to that point. However, a better focus may be adding illustrations and photography to existing articles. This lower hanging fruit can be quickly explained and understood by newcomers. — Dispenser 13:44, 8 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia avoids former Britannica essays: As a major part of Internet culture, Wikipedia can be studied and taught in schools, by focusing on various aspects of the Wikipedia project. For example, the heavy reliance on third-party sources, with less coverage from primary sources, is an important concept in objective journalism. Also, the avoidance of expert essays, using sourced text instead, differs from the manner in which Encyclopedia Britannica had allowed leading experts, in various fields, to write essay-style articles with no sources. Hence, there are some major aspects of Wikipedia, which can be used to focus teaching of journalism concepts. -Wikid77 (talk) 05:38, 13 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not sure I trust an army of students 6 to 12 to write an encyclopedia, under one IP address, which helps corrupt the students' better will with the mask of anonymity, thus causing them to vandalise articles en masse. I think I wrote a ton of stuff on that, but I forgot what happened to it. --

Σ talk contribs

22:51, 23 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The teacher could be asked to guard against vandalism as part of the program. Robert 00:46, 7 September 2011 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Robert the Devil (talk • contribs) 00:45, 7 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

It looks like I'm showing my age :-) I had been thinking of it happening the other way round: the teacher would set the assigment to be done on paper (handwritten or word processed), and would only, then, invite the best ones to ready them further for publication on Wikipedia. Thanks, though, everyone, for your responses to my suggestion... all duly noted, and taken on board. TheAMmollusc (talk) 08:06, 16 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I think we already do this, actually - great minds think alike! See "Wikipedia Ambassador Program" Social tamarisk (talk) 20:57, 25 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, this is exactly what we do, and the program is measuring as a success for both the student participants, and Wikipedia goals. So yes it's a good idea, and the program can use community support and involvement. -- My76Strat (talk) 08:23, 16 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The program is now known as the Global Education Program, and many thousands of students are participating this fall. Inside the US it's known as the United States Education Program. It has indeed been shown to effectively motivate students, as you suggest. We could certainly use your help in recruiting more professors and more volunteers to contribute as Campus Ambassadors and Online Ambassadors! Dcoetzee 23:02, 20 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

A high school teacher in Australia here, advising that I've already had a couple of my best students do some constructive editing on some articles. But I do have to pedantically point out that, this being a global program, we don't have fall here (we do autumn) and it's spring now anyway. ;-) HiLo48 (talk) 23:54, 20 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Oops :-) That's exciting, we don't have any official projects sponsored by the program in Australia yet, I have to wonder if anyone there would be interested. We're also just starting to branch into high schools. Lots of potential. Dcoetzee 03:12, 21 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Linkrot - What to do?

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I would like to gather some input on what can be done to eliminate Wikipedias problems with linkrot. I already made a number of proposals none of which actually led anywhere. The following is a collection of links to previous discussions regarding this topic:

I still come across a lot of articles with dead reference links, so I think the linkrot problem is still far from being solved. I encourage all editors to comment on this topic. Thanks. Toshio Yamaguchi (talk) 22:10, 10 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I think they are separate issues. To repair link rot, we have people who monitor the category, and add information to the bare URL. Once the link has gone dead, it involves a different process to recover the source. While it might make sense to repair both aspects simultaneously, I will admit that I clean a lot of link rot by adding the information, while leaving the dead links for another. (partially because I have yet to learn the means). My76Strat (talk) 22:32, 10 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I am mainly concerned with the dead links. The problem is that once a link has died it is in many cases impossible to restore it. We need to do something before the links go dead, at least that's my opinion. The coverage of services like the Internet Archive doing link archiving on a regular basis are not satisfactory for our purposes in my opinion. And the majority of our editors does (for various reasons) not do anything to ensure the reference links they introduce will remain stable in the future. Also I know that Wikiwix already archives Wikipedias links and I appreciate that. However I think that alone is not sufficient to preserve the verifiability of our entire content (if that is possible after all, I doubt it). And I would like to highlight again that we are all volunteers here. If online only sources go dead, the information supported by that source is in question and the work put into researching and putting together that information can be regarded as wasted completely. Toshio Yamaguchi (talk) 22:50, 10 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Create our own archive service (much like WebCite, except hopefully it won't crash). But I doubt the WMF will support hosting such a site. /ƒETCH COMMS / 00:32, 11 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

My GSoC project was on this and through it I created the ArchiveLinks extension. The route we decided to go was to partner with archive.org. They will be archiving all new links on demand from a feed that the extension produces and making them available shortly thereafter (i.e. within a matter of hours/days ). The extension then hooks into the parser to add links to the cached version after every external link on the wiki. Feel free to ask away if you have any questions. --Kevin Brown (talk) 01:26, 11 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

To my initial understanding, WP:WAYBACK is supposed to provide another possibility. My76Strat (talk) 02:09, 11 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I think the WMF should seriously consider doing this. If some way could be included to choose whether to archive images or not, that would be helpful, too. I find that I generally don't need images in any archive of a source as I tend to cite text, not images. The only part which would be difficult is citing text contained within flash. My opinion is that a source not in flash should be sought instead. That said, a text archiving service would definitely benefit the WMF as it would allow the various Wikipedia sites to become better due to cited sources not disappearing. I like the idea of the extension, above, though that would need to be implemented by a developer (as would any other citation service operated by the WMF). ···日本穣^? · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe · Join WikiProject Japan! 04:07, 11 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

This is a major issue for our project and one that really needs to be solved for our long-term success. Here's a bit of an update:

Kevin's ArchiveLinks extension has made substantial progress in addressing the issue. I believe it still requires a bot to crawl the pages to get those citations archived.
A few of the WMF staff have recently been working on m:Wikicite as a long term solution, but this is a major undertaking and will require a lot more work.
WebCite (webcitation.org) went down a few weeks ago, so all those archive links are currently non-functional.
Wikiwix is no longer functioning (at least for me), so those links are not working either.

Personally, I would like to see ArchiveLinks get deployed here at enwp as Kevin has worked with the WMF and got them partnered with the Wayback Machine (archive.org) to come up with a workable solution to this problem.
@Kevin, could you please let us know what still needs to be done to get this deployed as our solution? Thanks. - Hydroxonium (T•C•V) 04:43, 11 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The only way we're going to be able to deal with this, long term, is to take over responsibility for archiving these links ourselves, by whatever method(s) we can. The ArchiveLinks extension sounds like an excellent idea, combined with a bot consistently crawling pages. Pesky (talk …stalk!) 05:13, 11 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, this is a very good idea, and timely. My76Strat (talk) 05:38, 11 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The extension actually has a mode that it can operate in to crawl pages itself. Though though that part of the extension still needs a lot of work. Basically I was using wget with a ton of flags to download all the pages from a given. Archive.org wanted a feed, so I had to create one and make it available to operate in that fashion. At the current time you must choose one mode or the other, you can't not operate with both local archival and feed generation mode, this could be fixed but would require another database table. I also disagree with the idea that the Internet Archive isn't able to handle archival. The entire organization is setup with the long term in mind, to give you an idea of what I mean they make statues of all their employees after they've been around for a few years so they can be remembered thousands of years from now. Regarding progress archive.org is now parsing the sample feed and archiving everything on demand. What they need now is a copy of the feed for the english wikipedia which I am in the process of producing. --Kevin Brown (talk) 16:37, 11 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

How would the ArchiveLinks extension deal with robots.txt? I occasionally find archive.org reporting that a page cannot be crawled or displayed because of robots.txt. I know we can ignore any request in the robots.txt file, but do we want to? -- Donald Albury 11:29, 12 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

We shouldn't ignore robots.txt. It's bad practice and will make us look bad. But that also means major sites like the NYT can't be archived by us or any other service. /ƒETCH COMMS / 14:27, 12 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Robots.txt is followed. It can be disabled with the wget flag -e robot=off. I didn't include an option to disable it as that goes against good practices on the internet and there is really no need to. One of the main reasons robots.txt was designed was to prevent spiders from going into infinite loops or loading pages that consumed a large amount of resources. This is something you don't want a spider doing. In addition there may be additional legal stuff with ignoring robots.txt (I have no clue and am totally guessing), but yeah anyhow I don't think anyone should disable robots for archival without seeking a qualified opinion first. --Kevin Brown (talk) 16:26, 12 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Wikiwix is no longer functioning (at least for me), so those links are not working either. Could it s possible to have more information ? thank you Pmartin (talk) 21:57, 12 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

My Apologies. Wikiwix is now working for me. At the time I wrote that statement, the archive links at Wikiwix would start loading but never complete. I clicked about 10 links to Wikiwix and waited 10 to 15 minutes, but the pages never loaded. I just checked again and all those links are working. It's possible that the problem was with my ISP. - Hydroxonium (T•C•V) 04:29, 14 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I made a request once, and it resulted in webcitebot. It wasn't well maintained, and didn't amount to much. I always wished that it had had a feature for articles that passed FA to archive all their online refs. I think that would create the kind of community who cares enough to make it work for all refs. That's what I recommend working on. - Peregrine Fisher (talk) 03:13, 15 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Ok, how should we go about that? I am not sure if the "consensus" at Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Archive 76#Automatically archive all reference links when an article gets FA nominated is sufficient to approach the foundation on that basis. Perhaps we should drop Maggie a note to hear what she thinks? Toshio Yamaguchi (talk) 10:36, 16 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Another bot request, maybe? It takes someone willing to stay on top of the request for quite a while to get it done. It can languish, and you may need to do some "anyone here" type comments to keep it active. - Peregrine Fisher (talk) 15:00, 16 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I'm willing to try anything/everything. Any type of progress is better than stagnating, which is what we have been doing. Any other input would be greatly appreciated. Thanks. - Hydroxonium (T•C•V) 03:24, 22 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I don't see any need to request our hard-pressed developers to create an archiving service when WebCite is perfectly adequate. It is stable and mature and seems to be in it for the long haul - it is widely used by scholars so the service is unlikely ot be withdrawn. I don't know if it is correct that the site crashed a few weeks ago but it is up now and all the links I checked at random are working. All sites are down occassionally for maintenance - even Wikipedia. It seems to me the problem is that there is currently no working WebCite bot. Creating a new archiving service will still require a bot to do the archiving and just has to be a heap more work. Spinning Spark 09:57, 22 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I know that one user actually maintains a (functioning?) WebCite tool on the toolserver. However a number of requests I submitted have still not been processed and I guess the global usage of this tool is probably very limited due to its location on the toolserver. I would prefer (and already proposed in the past) to have a quick link to such a tool (maybe in the toolbox). The questions are:

1.) who could make the necessary change to the skin/interface for the tool to appear?

2.) would the user maintaining the tool be willing to have his tool used that way?

3.) would the community be willing to accept a tool from that particular user?

4.) could the user be convinced to release the source code of the tool and thus enable other developers to maintain it?

5.) is WebCite capable of handling the large number of requests which could result from the tool?

If all of these questions could be answered, linkrot could be actively combatted by practically any user on a large scale. Toshio Yamaguchi (talk) 12:28, 27 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Inappropriate usernames

Every admin will be aware that a significantly high number of potentially productive and constructive users choose, as their username, their initial or main editing topic. This results very often both in their being blocked under UAA policy and quite frequently in their article being flagged for deletion. And we lose thereby a number of potentially good editors.

I am not a software expert. Is there any way in which first time editors creating accounts could receive an automatic warning telling them to avoid choosing usernames that relate directly to their editorial interest? This would obviously alleviate to a small extent the work of the admins but, more importantly, would possibly retain new editors who might well otherwise be discouraged when their first article and their chosen username relate, causing the rejection of one or both. --Anthony Bradbury^"talk" 19:06, 13 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

its possible that a swich could be done that would say something like if Username is an IP or contains zero edits then display X message telling them this. I don't know if thats something that the programmers would do though. But I don't think it would be very hard. --Kumioko (talk) 19:14, 13 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think that solves the problem. You'd want to give the warning at the point of account creation, at which point you have no idea what subject the person is going to work on.

I think it would be better if more admins followed the policy about not instantly blocking apparently constructive editors, and if more tag-happy editors would actually read the WP:COI guideline, especially the bits about a close connection not resulting in a complete prohibition on editing. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:01, 13 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Pretty much this. Bag and tag is certainly a lot less effort, but I really wish more administrators would first try education and warnings. And don't get me started on blocking folks who already have name changes requests filed! –xeno^talk 20:05, 13 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Yes. My basic point was to avoid having to block new editors, by in some way (I don't know how) letting them know as they create accounts that they should not demonstrate a relationship between their username and their editing interest. --Anthony Bradbury^"talk" 19:12, 14 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I am slightly confused by your opening claim that editor's get blocked for choosing their main editing topic as a username. This, in itself, is not against WP:User name. Names such as User:Football79, User:Geologyguy, User:Tennis expert and User:Physicsjock are all acceptable names and should not be blocked (one of them is, but for entirely unrelated reasons). It is promotional usernames which are against policy. I guess you really mean user names named after an organisation are problematic but may well be good faith editors. It would not be practical to determine if a submitted user name was an organisation name - too many local businesses to expect any database to cover them all. A warning would need to go to all new users and the appropriate place to place that would be on the account creation screen. Spinning Spark 11:49, 22 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I think that you're forgetting that WP:Nobody reads the directions. Newbies get blocked fairly often for a username that is technically approved by the policy, mostly because people remember what someone told them the policy said a couple of years ago rather than reading it for themselves.

BTW, if you're interested in this issue, you might like to join the discussion at Wikipedia talk:Username policy#Recent_revert. I'm trying to expand the WP:CORPNAME to rein in some of this application creep, so that it's more obvious that Mark at Alcoa (talk · contribs) (a name discussed extensively and approved as both non-promotional and a very convenient COI disclosure/warning to other editors to keep an eye on company-related edits) is not a violation of this section. WhatamIdoing (talk) 14:55, 22 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

confused - please help! map request

Hi!

If you have worked with world maps before, please help! I want to make one. I am so confused and helpless in this part of wikipedia. I have been editing Muammar Gaddafi, and I want to put up a map of nations he's visited, warred with, tried to merge with. I have a list of nations, sourced, ready-to-go, but i don't know how to make the map. If you can help, I'm offering you a barnstar for your hard work. And please understand, Gaddafi's 40+ yrs in power have created an interesting list of nations. I think you'll find it exciting and intriguing when I share the list with you. Anyway, send me a message to my talk page and I'll send you the list of countries. I like the map of Nations visited by Pope John Paul II and I think it's a great example of what we can do. Again, thank you so much for your help!

Sincerely,

Screwball23 talk 19:48, 14 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Linking to Wikias as a replacement of excessive fictional information

Earlier today I was interested in some information about the comic character Iron Man. I ended up on Alternative versions of Iron Man, which is a rather poor quality article. I would also consider the material intricate detail only of interest to a select group of fans and thus outside the scope of wikipedia. I know some people agree with me, while other editors strongly disagree. In this case I am actually a fan, but the article was so poor it did not give me the information I wanted. Instead I decided to head over to the Marvel Wikia and behold: A full list of alternate appearances with yummy images and subarticles for every single one of them. With the limitations we set ourselfs (e.g. wp:V, wp:PLOT, wp:NFC) we can never compete with something like that, even if a significant fraction of our editors wasn't actively trying to delete such articles as wp:CRUFT. Why do we try? Why don't we just add prominent external links to such Wikias? We would of course be losing traffic too them, but by handing it to the Wikias we are still sticking to our core goal of spreading freely licensed information. What are your thoughts? Yoenit (talk) 21:51, 14 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The link between Wikipedia and Wikia has been almost as big of rift as the whole issue of fancruft, where Wikia was originally treated as if it was a sister project (originally Wikicities at the time) to where it now is merely another external link, one that is as often as not quickly removed even when the Wikia pages are pretty decent.

For myself, I think purging this content from Wikipedia and the related sister projects was a huge mistake, and is part of the reason why Wikipedia is losing editors. I also know this is an uphill battle, where some editors would love to remove even mere external links to Wikia in a "see also" section (or "External Links" section). Just looking through the history of Template:Wikia I think should tell you more than you would expect to learn about this history, together with the deletion discussions (there have been three). I suppose it is time to hold another deletion discussion on this template? --Robert Horning (talk) 22:25, 14 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

For all but the largest fan wikis, it's often a violation of WP:ELNO#EL12, which discourages links to small open wikis. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:08, 20 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, but the areas which attract most of the "cruft" (for lack of a better word) also tend to have large wikis. For example, Transformers wiki (15.000 articles), Marvel wikia (88.000 articles), Star Wars wikia (86.000 articles)Yoenit (talk) 17:35, 20 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

"Small" in ELNO terms is measured by the number of users, not the number of articles. It's mostly about the likelihood of vandalism being caught. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:19, 22 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

We should treat links to Wikia the same as any other external links. If the Wikia wiki is the dominant fan wiki for the topic and a good source of info, and editors of the article agree to link it, then link it. The only issue is possible contributory copyright infringement, since Wikia wikis frequently include far more non-free images than could possibly could be justified by fair use. Dcoetzee 22:59, 20 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

article not found

I was looking for an article on Lucite Acrylic GOLD Fleck Candles. I don't really know much about them except my great grandmother had a set on her dining table. A seller of them on e bay said: "The Crystal Clear, Gold Fleck Lucite Candles are about 10" long, plus the metallic silver cord wick, and about 5/8" diameter at the base. We believe these candles were in production from 1979 to 1988, as we have (or had) four like these in gold, in the original box which we were able to precisely date." Mabe you can forward this to someone who is into research and writing articles. Thank-you Brett Baker — Preceding unsigned comment added by 98.68.164.254 (talk) 16:49, 15 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia does not yet have articles about those types of collectibles, so you will need to try a Google Search request, such as:

• http://www.google.com/search?q=Lucite%20Acrylic%20GOLD%20Fleck%20Candles

Then look through those other webpages to see how the candles are described. Currently, most articles in Wikipedia are about generalized types of furniture and household items, rather than specific styles and models of items. Hence, an item such as "beach towel" has only a small section of text within the article "Towel" rather than a set of 100 common styles of beach towels. Even the crown jewels of major nations do not yet have articles showing the famous crowns of each monarch during the past 300 years (see: Crown Jewels of Sweden, as example of minimal details). Wikipedia's coverage of antiques and collectibles is still at a very basic level. Try searching in Google or Bing.com, for specific styles of collectibles. -Wikid77 (talk) 09:38, 16 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Gender and sports - trying to formulate a proposal

So we want to increase participation by women, right? It seems to me that one way to do this is by avoiding the use of phrases that assume a male gender.

This is particularly problematic in the sports world, to the point where I scarcely know where to begin enumerating the difficulties. We have the situation where soccer World Cup is assumed to refer to the men's tournament (see recent discussion). Australia national basketball team is about the men's team, without even so much as a hatnote for the women's team. We have Category:Sportswomen by sport but no corresponding category for the men; the women's category has 39 sports listed as subcats, while the men have 10. (Why is that a problem, you ask? Because the men are in categories like Category:Canadian soccer players while the women are relegated to Category:Canadian women's soccer players.)

I and others have attempted to raise these concerns elsewhere and elsewhen but have to date not gotten much response, even after a fair bit of cajoling. See, for instance, Wikipedia:Village pump (miscellaneous)/Archive 34#Gender and sports and PRIMARYTOPIC and Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)/Archive 70#Sportsperson categories and gender. Piecemeal approaches—hoping that a local consensus can be built into a stronger, broader consensus—have fallen under the weight of editors proclaiming that "This would affect all countries and require a much wider discussion." (See, for instance, Talk:Australia national basketball team#Requested move.)

Well, consider this the wider discussion. I hope it gets more attention.

What I would like to see is an acknowledgement that we have a responsibility to treat the two genders equitably. A good example is United States national soccer team, which is a disambiguation page that refrains from assuming that the men's team ought to be our "default" choice. Certainly in some cases, the difference in popularity would be too overwhelming for this to be a reasonable approach, but our current threshold is far too high. Doesn't a dedication to gender equality suggest that we ought to make some accommodations in this realm, so that maybe women don't see us assuming masculinity every time they put in a search term?

I would welcome any help refining this into a concrete proposal that might get a better response on WP:VPP. Thank you. Powers ^T 17:17, 15 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I don't understand what you're looking for. What are you trying to accomplish, in a single sentence? /ƒETCH COMMS / 19:09, 18 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

- If I may be so bold to interpret, I think the goal here is to not automatically assume that a link to a national sports team, where there may be teams of both genders using essentially the same name, be automatically assumed to be the men's team and not necessarily the women's team. Broadly interpreting WP:NPOV, I would have to agree that is wrong and certainly pushing a POV after a fashion. I do think this falls more into the realm of WP:SOFIXIT rather than anything really needing discussion, especially as precedence can be found in some other articles. If anything, the questions that should be raised here is now to do that without creating an edit war in the process. --Robert Horning (talk) 01:52, 19 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with you entirely on the categories problem: there's no need to split things by gender right at the top. All footballers, for example, should be in one category, perhaps with male and female subdivisions thereafter. Regarding the articlespace, I think that generally the more prominent team should be the focus of the "national team" article. As I see it, two options exist:

Merge the male and female team articles into a new "country national sport team" article.
More prominent (generally male) team takes primacy, with a hatnote applied to link to the less prominent team right at the top of the article. This would involve less work, be less contentious, and also (imho) look neater, but still wave a banner right at the top of the article saying "look, we cover women's sport too!".

As an editor almost wholly uninvolved in sports articles, I think your idea is a good one. Can I be cheeky and ask that if you decide to do wholesale article creation, you ask for the autopatrolled bit? Special:Newpages always seems to have be clogged with sports articles that people don't want to touch because it's outside their field of expertise. Good luck with moving the idea forwards. Brammers (talk/c) 07:51, 19 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Well No.1 isn't going to work - the first thing that would happen with "England national football team" is someone will propose it get split into two articles as it has become unwieldy. Also, generally speaking, one wouldn't want to filter out half the content of an article

No.2 more or less happens now, except the hatnote isn't a hatnote currently, but sometimes a "see also" in the "see also" section, or linked via "sport-code in country" type templates.

Generally speaking these are the primary subjects notability wise, based on coverage, audience and fiscal considerations. I don't see a need to go changing it on some PC appeasement campaign - personally I'd think it a bit patronising. Much as I would like to see women's football on par with men's, it isn't happening any time soon. --ClubOranje^T 10:25, 19 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Incidentally - for the World Cup example cited, the reason it is assumed that it refers to the men's tournament is sources all do the same: Fifa refer to the Men's premier tournament as the Fifa World Cup, while the age based and women's tournaments are disambiguated. --ClubOranje^T 10:34, 19 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Here's another example of this problem: Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2011 September 12#Category:Women's association football players. Apparently, according to the participants in this discussion, women don't play soccer. They play "Women's soccer", which is a totally different sport. This isn't an issue of primary subjects or official names -- it's outright sexism, plain and simple. And it's rife throughout the sporting topics in this encyclopedia, and I'd like to fix it. But I don't know where to start. Powers ^T 12:28, 19 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think sexism on Wikipedia is the main issue. If [sports team name] is most commonly associated with the men's team, then the article should (generally) be about that one. We can't change the popularity of female sports teams. Of course, sexism on Wikipedia is a problem, but not one solved by renaming articles. Now, I agree with the categories stuff mentioned in the proposal—make subcategories for men and women, rather than sticking the men in the non-gender-specific category and the women in the gender-specific one. This just seems like common sense to me. /ƒETCH COMMS / 23:05, 19 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I know that where I live, coverage of women's sport is treated as a postscript to the main sporting stories -- see here for an example -- only one article of 20 on the front page deals with women's sport. To that extent, the bias in Wikipedia reflects real life. MER-C 10:43, 20 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- But it's not really the same thing. Publications with limited space (or time) devote more space (or time) to the more popular sports. That's to be expected. But we don't. Wikipedia is not paper. We aim to provide commensurate coverage no matter what sport or gender is involved. All I'm asking for is that when someone -- possibly a woman, whose participation we're trying to increase -- comes to us looking for information on women's sports, that we can present a more welcoming face by treating both genders equitably in article and category naming. Powers ^T 12:18, 20 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for all of your ideas -- what's the next step? How do I go about formulating an actual proposal or plan of action? Powers ^T 12:18, 20 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I'm inclined to believe that at least part -- if not all -- of these systemic language issues are to do with the way these sports are referred to outside of Wikipedia, and less that Wikipedia in itself suffers from any specific problem. It's reasonable to assume that Soccer World Cup does indeed refer to the "World Cup" that most readers of Wikipedia would expect to find when browsing the encyclopaedia: it strikes me as political correctness gone mad to imagine that Wikipedia has some special mission to redefine common-use topic nouns for the sake of increasing editor participation. Indeed Wikipedia cannot shape its content based on its own views no matter how noble; we cannot rename things in the outside world for the sake of our own internal issues with recruiting female editors and I believe this is better accomplished through other means. The day we rename articles and categories in the name of gender equality, at odds with the language used in the world we describe, is the day that Wikipedia has become a social networking site. --Tristessa (talk) 16:00, 20 September 2011 (UTC) Corrected --Tristessa (talk) 16:01, 20 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I think it's reasonable for sports categories to recognize gender, because the sports themselves do. Here are my thoughts:

Parallel cats, e.g., Category:Canadian sportsmen and Category:Canadian sportswomen, are clearer to less experienced editors. Using the gender-neutral label for what you intend to be a male-only category will result in some people thinking that women being listed in both "Canadian sportspeople" and "Canadian sportswomen". With parallel cats, you don't have to magically know what belongs in the cat.
For all the talk about the 'dominant' gender getting the neutral category, we have a poor track record for respecting the idea. For example, we have a Category:Female gymnasts, but no male-oriented category, even though gymnastics is a female-dominated sport. We have no reason to think this trend will change.

I think that our best option is this:

When separation by gender is desirable, to cleanly split the cats so that both resulting cats are explicitly labeled "male" and "female" (or "men" and "women") in the name of the cat, and both are placed at the same level in every parent category.
When separation is not desirable (e.g., too few articles to bother), to not split the cats at all (e.g., Category:Croquet players) and describe the inclusive nature on the cat's page.
To never have one category that is "Athletes", used by the dominant gender, with another category (or worse, a sub-cat) that is "<insert gender here> athletes".

NB that this doesn't affect article names, which need to comply with WP:Article titles. This is solely a proposal for rationalizing the category naming. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:33, 20 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

That looks like a good start. Do you think WT:AT would be a good place to discuss issues of article title inequity? Powers ^T 12:19, 21 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

WT:AT would be the appropriate forum, but I would put that conversation off until another time. My recommendation is to fix all the cats (which will take some work) before even starting the discussion on names. BTW, I believe that the next step in addressing the cats will be expanding WP:Cat gender to deal with the situation of both genders of athletes being (usually) topics of special encyclopedic interest (whereas only the female gender is of interest for politicians). WhatamIdoing (talk) 14:45, 22 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I have started that discussion here, though there has been no response yet. Powers ^T 13:41, 27 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Site wide notice

A thing has occurred to me, I'd like to hear additional thoughts! When an editor is about to be completely banned from Wikipedia, (an ultimate sanction) that a site notice should invite full community involvement. Right now there is a terrible policy in place that falls far short of attracting the opinions of interested users. This applies to many discussions, but in particular, the ultimate sanction should have community assent! IMO -- My76Strat (talk) 06:01, 16 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Why would an IP who does not want to edit care about the inner workings of Wikipedia, or would the notice be enabled for registered users only? →Σ ^_talk_contribs 06:21, 16 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I would primarily want it for established users. To my understand a few IP's fall into that consideration, so I suppose they should have some ability to request it. Lord help that if it should ever be me, I would hope those who cared would know, without need for canvassing, or other technical ability, ie a block.--My76Strat (talk) 07:18, 16 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

A major problem in large discussions on Wikipedia is the uninformed showing up to throw their two cents in without any real understanding of the issues at play. I'm not sure a listing on {{cent}} would affect the signal:noise ratio in the right direction. Not to mention the fact that there are such discussions how many times per week? People will simply stop paying attention to them rather quickly. → ROUX ₪ 07:46, 16 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I understand your reservation. I agree this is a valid consideration. It may well be that we have the most practical process in place. And I appreciate your response so the other things can also be considered.--My76Strat (talk) 07:58, 16 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with Roux. I'm unsure what type of situations you have in mind, where someone was completely banned from Wikipedia where wider involvement would be beneficial. Do you have examples? Certainly a site notice inviting random people who have no knowledge of the situation seems pretty harmful.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 10:34, 16 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I would like to think that a total ban was a punishment for a very serious offence and that the decision to impose it was not taken lightly. Are you saying this isn't the case or do you suspect some sort of abuse is going on?--Ykraps (talk) 17:00, 16 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

No I don't have a particular concern, nor any doubt that due weight is given. I apologize if that impression was given. I only wondered aloud if it was a thing we should do. I understand the reasons given that this may not be productive and I appreciate that comments were given.--My76Strat (talk) 17:19, 16 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Okay, thanks for clarifying. My initial feeling is that it would be impractical and unnecessary. Sorry.--Ykraps (talk) 17:56, 16 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I agree. Perhaps there is or should be an email notification which a user can sign up for. If they were specifically interested in knowing when such a sanction is being discussed. I may be totally off track, but I presumed and hope this is a sanction that is relatively rare.--My76Strat (talk) 18:22, 16 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I think this is neither wise nor necessary. Trust me, users interested in such discussions already have AN and AN/I watchlisted. → ROUX ₪ 18:34, 16 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I think that Roux is right: We have a central forum for such discussions, and it's not difficult to find. WP:CBAN even tells you that AN is the normal place to discuss such things. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:37, 20 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Would the WP:Feedback request service be of interest? —Akrabbim^talk 15:00, 22 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Simple English ruleset

The recent ANI thread about the Nanjing Normal University class project has got me thinking. A lot of the problems in the ANI thread were about these new users creating inappropriate articles and using inappropriate references - the sort of thing that new users from anywhere might do. Adding to this problem was the fact that they weren't native speakers of English, so there was a language barrier too. Nevertheless, most contributors at the ANI thread thought that these students could be good contributors, and also that having more editors from non-English-speaking countries could help counter systemic bias. Note that these editors do speak English, just that it might not be all that advanced. I think that a lot of these contributors have problems understanding the complex English used in Wikipedia policy pages (and this is in addition to the already-steep learning curve).

Hence my idea: Could we have a ruleset written in Simple English? I am thinking of something like the simplified ruleset, but even shorter, more to the point, and most importantly, using words that the vast majority of international speakers of English would understand. I also thought of making a Simple English page for every major policy/guideline, but this might be harder to maintain. (It would have the advantage, though, that we could use some of the policies from Simple English Wikipedia, though some of their rules are different.) What do you all think? — Mr. Stradivarius ^♫ 09:14, 19 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

based on what I see there, they can read English well enough. What they didn't understand well enough was the concept of notability, and the instructor had not anticipated there would be difficulties with this. From my own experience, beginners in a class find it very difficult to select appropriate topics, they need guidance, and I think the instructor now realizes the guidance that is needed. DGG ( talk ) 16:40, 19 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Simplified explanations of policies sounds like a good idea, not just for simple-English but for everyone, because once editors understand the basic policies, then they can edit hundreds of articles which follow a basic, repeated pattern, without having to know an advanced level of policies or English vocabulary. Such simplified pages could also benefit the help-desk editors, who could suggest the shorter policy-pages to new users. For example, we have numerous editors from India who should learn to avoid "ALL CAPITAL LETTERS" in writing articles. However, note that some of the policy-page simplification has been done in various "intro" pages, already, so in effect, the job of simplifying is almost done. The task remains to ensure that all the basics are covered, and then let more people know how to list the simple-versions of policies and guidelines. Meanwhile, the WP:MOS restrictions need to be reduced, because many issues are just unneeded complexity (such as telling people to put lead-zero on "0.25" while ".40" is an allowed exception, is just a totally unneeded restriction: all calculators handle ".xx"). Anyway, check: WP:Welcome for the current simple overview pages. -Wikid77 (talk) 17:01, 19 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Old Style calendar pages

After working on many of the yearly articles, "1054", "1620", "1776", "1789" (etc.), I realize that Wikipedia had no articles to show the full Old Style calendars, which begin on 25 March each year. So, I am creating those Old-Style calendar pages, starting with:

Old Style common year starting on Monday

There is a note inside article "Benjamin Franklin" to explain his literal birthyear was "1705" because Old-Style year 1706 began on 25 March, and Franklin was born in January, still considered the tail-end of the prior year, 1705. The calendar for England and the American colonies only changed to start new years on 1 January after 1752, so there are over 150 years of Old-Style calendar years which affect the dating of British/colonial events in January, February, and early March of those years. By having full-calendar pages, then it will be easier to show how January was the end of the prior year. -Wikid77 (talk) 17:01, 19 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

As I understand it, the movement of the start of the year from March to January was not necessarily one of Gregorian reform; just in Great Britain at least they coincided. I don't think we can have all possible years, there are simply too many. It just seems horribly complicated to figure out and get right. Grandiose (me, talk, contribs) 08:54, 20 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Focusing on major calendars: I agree that there are many different, confusing calendar changes which the various nations each adopted along the way. However, the specific calendar styles for England (and related regions) have affected many notable events, so I think the extra articles are needed. For example, the move of the new-year from March to January did not exactly "coincide" with Gregorian reform, but affected two separate years (1751/1752), as described in the new articles:

Old Style 1751 - ended on 31 December, with New Year's Day as 1 January
Old Style 1752 - transition to Gregorian by dropping 3–13 September

England could have dropped the 11 days in 1751, while also ending the year on 31 December, but Old Style 1751 remained a totally Julian calendar which ended at January 1752, and then 1752 became the transition year (dropping 11 days). By having separate calendar articles for each year, it is easier to describe the distinctions. Anyway, the calendar in England began on 25 March for over 500 years, as clearly a notable issue, and yet Wikipedia had very little to show for that massive time period of calendars. However, I agree that having separate historical calendars for every nation could become very confusing (see: Gregorian calendar#Adoption), so I am focusing, now, on those 500 years of England and related regions (Wales, Ireland, the American colonies, etc.). Meanwhile, we have Template:Year_in_other_calendars to track many of the cultural calendars. There are a lot of issues, but we can focus on the major aspects. -Wikid77 (talk) 16:55, 20 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Noticeboard archiving

Could the archiving for the general admin noticeboards be changed from MiszaBot to ClueBot III? ClueBot III archival is preferable, as many links to ANI and AN grow linkrot, which CBIII cures by intelligently changing the link-to-be-rotted to the archives of material (here for instance), whereas MiszaBot just cuts and pastes while the link rots, grows mold, crumbles to dust, gets absorbed into the ground, and gets reincarnated as an apple tree. Thoughts? →Σ τ c. 01:31, 20 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Does the bot do that for all links, no matter where they are on wikipedia? That would be awesome. Yoenit (talk) 07:32, 20 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

CBIII has edits in article space. I never knew why, until Anomie politely enlightened me. To answer your question, I believe so, yes. →Σ τ c. 07:34, 20 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Well, you have my full fledged support then, I encounter rotted links regularly. Yoenit (talk) 07:41, 20 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The cybernetics of Wikipedia

This is my first time posting on the Wikipedia forums, so hello everyone!

I would like to propose the construction of a social memory platform, augmented by a cyberneticly linked social network, working to resolve a single, cohesive memory from the minds of an entire population. My social reasoning machine model (SRM) attempts to extrapolate the long-term/short-term memory processes shared by the mind and computer chip onto a social network. It manifests as a self-organizing encyclopedia of public opinion capable of generating and presenting the most relevant information to a user for any subject, as dictated by the previously recorded bias of the population.

The SRM’s long-term memory is the ’journal’. This is a social encyclopedia collaboratively assembled from input by the entire population with links between related articles. It looks a lot like the current state of Wikipedia. The key difference is that while any anonymous individual can update or vandalize content on Wikipedia, the SRM requires all content stored in long-term memory to first be processed through open debate in its short-term memory, the ‘forum’.

When a user submits a piece of content to the forum, the idea is debated by the population for a period of time before a simple, majority-rule vote. The proposed edit either makes it in or it doesn’t. The process of deciding relevancy by a yes/no majority-rule vote defines a pattern of individual bits, providing us with an observable social bias. The short-term process looks a lot like Reddit. Pieces of content are organized by votes/activity on the front page, and debate is organized into a ranked, expanding comment tree. Sub-communities can hold their own votes to define their own patterns. In addition to new content, users can post corrections and updates to the journal, a self-refining process conforming the SRM to better reflect the population’s bias. Any level of resolution is possible down to voting on individual word choice or punctuation.

While a bit is being debated, users cite other bits of information already stored in the journal to reinforce their viewpoints. The links created by this citation process, combined with the results and data from the voting systems, create a network of relational relevance throughout the contents of the journal: a measurable network of popular relevance. This system does not attempt to predict or model the “truth”. The SRM maps the pattern of bias held by the entire population of what they believe the truth might be. When contrasted against a body of verified research and reportage, this shows us what fields of study need the most attention by an educational institution such as today’s Wikipedia

The whole model also includes a profile system, much akin to Facebook, which I hope is the next step that Google+ had hoped to be. The social reasoning machine allows every networked individual equal access to having their unique opinion heard across both space and time.

This is the first time my ideas have had any peer feedback, and I would really like to hear what the Wikipedia community has to say. I know that putting these ideas out here opens them up for other people to take advantage of (“haven’t you seen 'Social Network?! a friend asks), but these ideas belong to the community.

Primary fields of citation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybernetics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_theory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_systems_theory

Google Docs: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1bhXJ3T3rrtlI3GEc1aFFrIul-AgOAa7wXJT8xzNCTYQ/edit?hl=en_US

TL;DR: [Wikipedia + Reddit = Artificial Intelligence?] — Preceding unsigned comment added by Ucsrm (talk • contribs) 13:48, 20 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I see you have moved your post from the policy village pump to here, but Roux original reply is still highly relevant, so I will repost it below. Yoenit (talk) 17:43, 20 September 2011 (UTC) [reply]

Um, this is kind of not at all what Wikipedia is for or what this specific page is for. There are no 'forums' as such on Wikipedia; all pages that aren't articles are, broadly speaking, supposed to only be used for improving articles or behind-the-scenes processes. This post does neither. You may wish to click here for an overview of what Wikipedia is for, or here. → ROUX ₪ 07:00, 20 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Most linked rating?

Is there any way to find out which articles has most wiki-links? just as stats.grok.se will tell how many people viewed a specific article.Electron9 (talk) 14:27, 21 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia:Most referenced articles. Sole Soul (talk) 15:31, 21 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

New Ways to Explore Content History

Right now Wikipedia's past contributions are separated from a page's current state within the history tab. But what if we could bring content history into the present page, showing the history of individual paragraphs or sentences? What could this do, both for newbies and experienced editors?

I recently completed a prototype tool called ‘Pivot’ that brings edit history to the sentence level of the article's text rather than line-by-line, edit-by-edit in the history tab as the current interface does. As I continue development, I’d really like some feedback from active Wikipedians as to what works, what doesn’t, and how it might be used. Would you be willing to give it a quick look and give me some comments?

To use the prototype, you can visit one of the following external links that layer the tool on top of different articles: Kiev article tool, Liancourt_Rocks article tool, Death_Star article tool

When you load the page, on the right hand side you’ll see four colored bars that match up with the scroll bar. These become more saturated if sentences in the region of the page have more edits (red), more contributors (yellow), a greater percentage of reverts (green), or were edited more recently (blue). Clicking on those bars will highlight the text, darkening sentences that have more edits, etc. so you can identify interesting areas to explore. Once you’ve picked out an interesting sentence, click on it to open up the history for that sentence. A new frame will pull open (some scrolling may be required thanks to a pernicious bug, sorry). In that frame you can see the most recent edit at the top of the list, and then previous edits going down into the past, along with editor names and comments. Words that have been added in an edit are highlighted in green. In turn, you can highlight the sentences that a contributor has made edits to in that window.

Would you be willing to give me some comments? You can also use this anonymous survey. I’m particularly interested in whether you think the tool helped you uncover the sorts of information I mentioned earlier, if you see any use for it in your daily editing tasks, and what you think could be improved. Are there particular situations that this tool would really help you out? Knowing where and when this tool can be used will help me tailor it for future users and maybe even apply it to all of Wikipedia.

If you know of any other Wikipedians who might also be willing to help, I'd appreciate you linking them in. You can find out more about me on my user page and personal home page. I'm more than happy to talk more about this research on my talk page or by email, and thank you for your time. JeffRz (talk) 14:26, 22 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I think that is a fantastic tool. It could be used for the same purposes as wikiblame but would seem to be far superior on the basis of that demo. It also seems to be able to semantically identify sentences as opposed to what you get with the diff service which often makes a simple one line edit look like the entire article has been rewritten. I would suggest that time and date stamps would be a useful addition. Also, on more mature articles it may be sensible to give the user the ability to request a limited date range. Having found a particular edit I am interested in, would it be possible to generate a URL to a diff so I can post a link to it?

Thanks for the feedback! We're definitely going to continue work on this, so I'll add your suggestions to the big list.JeffRz (talk) 02:56, 23 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I am concerned what this will do to page load times. It sounds like the tool will have to read an awful lot of page history first to be able to generate the data. Do you have any take on what this is going to do to page load times and server load? Spinning Spark 19:23, 22 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the feedback. Yes, the tool does have to parse through a ton of history, but this isn't done at page load. We can preprocess and store the data, since it isn't that big once you factor in compression (one to two orders of magnitude smaller than the database store for a page's entire history). The tool as you see is feeding preprocessed out of a database after the page loads. In the future, if implemented broad scale, then whenever an edit is made we can have a background task on the server add that edit to the page's traces rather than recomputing all of them. The only way to really determine how loaded the servers will end up being is to try it, so we're looking to deploy it on a live mirror of Wikipedia to see how it works. Of course, that means we have to precompute thousands of pages first! JeffRz (talk) 02:56, 23 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Table template safesubst?

(Honestly, I have no idea whether to put this here or at the proposals page) There are a lot of table and column templates on Wikipedia, and I was thinking of this after seeing what code would show after trying to subst the {{table}} template. Perhaps we could try making the table templates subst-able? If a user wishes to use one on his/her page, using subst: or safesubst:, this could likely help them, as it would make it much easier for a user to use that template as a literal template. An example of the code changes that could be done to make a template work like this would be this edit I did at Template:Table. (Yes, I did revert it right after so it would be there as simply the code changes) LikeLakers2 (talk | Sign my guestbook!) 18:04, 24 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, this idea would add flexibility to the templates. But it will be hard to recode the templates to make the subst-ed version look "natural", matching the standard wikitext for tables. I extracted your suggested template definition into User:John of Reading/X1 so that I could try it out, and used it with and without "subst" at User:John of Reading/Sandbox - you'll see that the subst-ed wikitext has 100 blank lines, some HTML comments, and some instances of the {{!!}} template. -- John of Reading (talk) 09:00, 26 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Basically sounds like a great idea, to get more people to start using the specific wikitable markup, which is much more flexible, for typesetting, then most of the table-column templates. For years, I had no idea that tables could be "smart-formatted" once those limited templates were avoided. Also, some table-templates fail to work with browser IE7 in Windows Vista, so that is another reason to subst those table-templates out of the articles. In the past, I have expanded Help:Table to explain more ways to adjust tables. Plus, we need to start explaining the need for tables to auto-widen for sight-impaired readers (to still fit tables when browser TextSize is "larger"), and those options are coded in the markup, not in most table-column templates. People need to know more about table markup settings and issues (see essay "WP:98 percent table width anomaly") and remember Help:Wikitable. For years, the CD-album tables of Template:Track_listing have caused wide gaps in IE7 browsers, and on wide screens, the table expands like "Elasticman" with columns spaced a mile apart because the template is based on width=xx% which expands to "fill the universe" when a reader widens the screen. Hence, many people just hard-code lists of musical album tracks, and abandon the hokey {Track_listing} tables. Instead, tables need to auto-widen within the size of their data, not morph by width=xx% into over-wide elastic balloons on wide screens. Most table-templates are future trouble. -Wikid77 (talk) 09:10, 26 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- I honestly think this would make perfect sense for {{table}}, hence why I posted this. It would allow noobs, and I'm not naming anybody, to make tables using the table template, and then subst it to make it as if they knew the table wikicode. LikeLakers2 (talk | Sign my guestbook!) 10:50, 26 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

More population templates - now Austria

We need to keep creating nation-population templates (for lists of towns), to get current counts for each town, as done for towns in Germany (on enwiki and dewiki). Now, I have adapted the Austria-population templates to later "automatically" set the current population of 2,475 Austrian towns and districts, as interwiki templates from German Wikipedia:

Category:Austria subdivision population templates - 9 templates for population of 2,475 towns or districts in Austria.

Those 9 Austria-population templates need to be connected to the Austria town infoboxes, to set the current population from inside those template lists of population counts. As you may know, in April 2010, the Germany-population templates were likewise adapted from German Wikipedia, and connected to Germany-town infoboxes, so each year, the town populations can be copied from German WP (in 16 Germany population templates) and update thousands of town articles for Germany. The template-format for Austria is the same as for Germany, but allows the word "date" to get the statistics as-of date. For example, for Vienna:

Population of Vienna: {{Metadata population AT-9|9}} = Template:Metadata population AT-9
Population of Favoriten: {{Metadata population AT-9|910}} = Template:Metadata population AT-9

Each year, the current population counts can be copied exactly from the 9 Austria interwiki templates on German Wikipedia (or updated from website Statistik Austria), and then those counts would "instantly" appear in the ~2,475 Austria town/district articles. The inhabitant counts can also be extracted to appear in population bargraphs, such as used in the 23 Districts of Vienna. The counts could be used later in live calculations, such as relative size of the Margareten-District population divided by Vienna, as a whole:

Relative size of Margareten in Vienna: {{#expr: Template:Metadata population AT-9 / Template:Metadata population AT-9 * 100}}% = Expression error: Unrecognized punctuation character "[".%
Relative size of Favoriten in Vienna: {{#expr: Template:Metadata population AT-9 / Template:Metadata population AT-9 * 100}}% = Expression error: Unrecognized punctuation character "[".%

Such population-data templates are extremely fast, designed as MediaWiki markup #switch statements, to quickly extract each town's population count as needed. --Wikid77 09:10, 26 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I want to chew the fat re: medical photos

I'm interested in hearing opposing views, the "con" side, of some ideas that I have dancing around my head, concerning the use of images in articles on medical topics, and the ongoing image filter discussions/research. No, I'm not trying to do a consensus poll, I just want to see opinions on a couple of things: 1. I would like to see a moratorium on images in medical articles until a decision is reached based on the image filter referendum/options. Impossible to enforce? I don't know. 2. If a filter is designed and implemented, I'd prefer to see one that teachers can use to filter what students can view while in class. Well, parents would have the same option at home.

What prompted this: First, I read an editorial by a guy who says his six-year-old is a Wikipedia fan: "My six-year-old can’t even fathom picking up a physical encyclopedia instead of visiting Wikipedia." They're starting really young now... Secondly, I came across a historical photo online, copyright expired, of a man hospitalized with smallpox. Pretty gruesome. I don't need to link to it, because there's already another vivid photo included the Wikipedia article. For me, the image is more than I want to see, I guess we all have personal limits. And I guess I'm just having visions of Wikipedia turning into rotten dot com when more copyright-free images start getting loaded onto Commons.

And before the chorus starts for "Not another save the childrunnn argument", let me just say, that sometimes, yes, it is about sparing kids from unnecessary imagery and trauma (hence suggestion #2 up there). I'm remembering back to when I was about 13 years old, back in the Jurassic age before the Interwebs... I had scoliosis and was put in a brace, and was asking questions about what could happen with treatment and so on. The well-meaning doctor loaned me a medical textbook, with the last 100 or so pages taped shut, and he warned me, "don't read that section". Well, that was where the photos were. So what do you think I did when I got home? Opened those pages and had a good look at them. So the photos were of extreme untreated cases, spines bent at 90 degree angles, etc. That was not a pleasant experience at all.

Is a temporary moratorium a good idea? Is it already too late? Is it censorship? Is giving schools/parents filtering power still contentious? I'm not looking for a flamewar here, just some honest opinions. OttawaAC (talk) 02:55, 27 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Strongest Possible Oppose Your idea of giving teachers/schools the ability to forcibly apply the image filter for those who don't want to use it is the reason the whole Image Filter idea should be scrapped before it is too late. The image filter is defended with the claim that it will always be entirely voluntary, so it can't be used for censorship, as a person choosing not to view images they find offensive cannot be considered censoring themselves. But now here we are, the image filter isn't even implemented, and already we are charging at breakneck speed down the slippery slope. (The slippery slope argument can be a logical fallacy, but it is not a fallacy when there are those who wish to achieve, and will continue to push for, the result at the bottom of the slope, as here) If we facilitate a teacher forcing the image filter on students, will a librarian be able to enforce filtering on the library's public computers? What about the library's wifi? How far is it to a country, for the sake of argument, Saudi Arabia, enforcing the Muhammad image filter on the entire country. Even if we have the abomination of the image filter forced upon us, we must make a clear stand against anything beyond voluntary filtering, as the moment it isn't voluntary, we are helping to facilitate censorship. As for your first idea, I really don't see a justification for it. Monty ₈₄₅ 03:44, 27 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose, obviously there have already been many more conservative ideas proposed and the reasons opposed to it are fairly well documented at Wikipedia:Perennial_proposals#Censor_offensive_images,Help:Options to not see an image, Wikipedia talk:Censorship (2006 proposal), Wikipedia:Graphic and potentially disturbing images, Wikipedia:Image censorship, and even more failed proposals, explanation pages, and talk page archives. Having been part of multiple attempts at censorship I don't see why you would believe something will arise here that has not been discussed before, or that a sudden onset of level-headed discussion will occur instead of back and forth bickering and infighting between two well defined sides. But if you like train wrecks...AerobicFox (talk) 04:19, 27 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Please do not vote, the mandate of the Idea Lab forum does not include consensus polling (at least that's how I read the blurb at the top of the page). I read some of the past discussions over contentious images, including the perennial proposals, but since the Commons referendum regarding filtering, much of the past discussion is dated now. 2006? I think rational discussion is warranted, desirable, and possible. If people would rather derail every discussion of a controversial topic with acid and venom and accusations etc., that would be more than unfortunate, it would be missing out on an opportunity. So is censorship a valid criticism, when schools, schoolboards and teachers already exercise their discretion in establishing curriculum? Re: libraries: when I was a teen, the naughty books like Lady Chatterleys Lover were kept in a locked glass cabinet behind the librarian's desk, and you needed an adult to meet with the librarian and check the book out for you (late 1980s, don't know if that's still done). OttawaAC (talk) 14:34, 27 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The mandate of Wikipedia is to share knowledge, not to shelter people from unpleasant knowledge. The old saw that "a picture is worth a thousand words" is apt here. Its one thing to understand something on a purely hypothetical level, and, as you found out, quite something else to actually see what it looks like. The educational value of such images is beyond question, disturbing though they may be. (for the record, I don't like them any more than you do, which I deal with by simply not looking at such articles) In a completely separate recent conversation I floated a alternate plan, but nobody seemed particularly interested in it. The idea was to use the Wikipedia CD Selection as the basis for selecting stable versions of general interest articles and making an online "Wikipedia for schools." The articles would be static, no open editing. No pop culture or porn articles, and no offensive images. With no open editing administrative needs would be minimal, all we need is for the Foundation to give up some server space, which I understand they have plenty of. Beeblebrox (talk) 02:18, 29 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

"The mandate of Wikipedia is to share knowledge, not to shelter people from unpleasant knowledge." I can agree with that statement, but here's where I get confused: Do readers not have a right to decide for themselves that they want to protect themselves from unpleasant (or even genuinely traumatic) information? Why eliminate the possibility that an educator or librarian could use filters at their own discretion to protect children's emotional health? Especially since they already do this with written material etc. and are expected to, in their role in loco parentis (acting as guardians of children's interests in the absence of the actual guardians, I think I'm using the phrase correctly)? Doesn't free speech have limits when it causes harm to other people?

Wikipedia already does have an image filter, that an individual user can choose to switch on (I'd wager not many people know it even exists, it took me over a month to stumble across it). I'm a bit curious, did you know that this option is available? And if you have heard of it, why haven't you used it? I wonder how many people do use it?

I mentioned rotten dot com way up above, and there are a lot of shock Websites that have been around since the mid-1990s, posting gory photos of car accident victims, decomposing corpses, extreme medical disfigurement, and so on. Those Websites started, as they claim, as anti-censorship statements in reaction to people who complained about controversial content being published on the Web, and who wanted to have limits or laws about Web content created. The shock Websites remain online due to U.S. free speech laws, and by claiming that they share informational content that at least some people are interested in seeing for whatever purpose. I think enforcing an absolute status quo here will produce the same content, because the definitions of informative or educational isn't clear, and any effort by editors to remove such material would fail on the grounds of free speech.

The pro- and anti-censorship arguments I've seen so far on the Wikipedia forums (and archives) seem to take it as a given that everyone agrees on what "censorship" is, and yet I also see contradictions that show that there are many different perceptions among users of what "censorship" means. I think if users are going to try to form consensus on pro- or anti-censorship polling, they'll have to first agree on a definition of censorship. No one can determine how to prevent "censorship" from happening unless they define what "censorship" is. (And what it isn't.)

I've done enough bloviating for one evening...(-;

OttawaAC (talk) 23:49, 29 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

What is and is not censorship is probably not something we are going to be able to resolve anytime soon, I wouldn't want to get hung up on that point. I am aware of the image filter, but I don't actually shock to easily, I just find certain medical images kind of gross. I don't think it is valid to argue that WP will gradually turn into a "shock site," those types of images have been repeatedly rejected by the community as inappropriate. For example, obviously our article on Goatse would be more explicit if it had an image, but thankfully it does not. (if you don't know what that is, don't Google it, trust me you don't want to know) The community is smart enough to generally be able to draw the line between illustrating a valid topic and showing something that is simply gratuitous. Beeblebrox (talk) 01:31, 30 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Censorship is editorial control by an external entity with coercive powers -- typically a government. If a United States federal court or Florida State court served us with a cease-and-desist order regarding publishing certain material, that would be censorship. If Florida state troopers or FBI agents entered the server building and shut down the servers, that would be censorship. If agents of the United States government threatened to arrest or assassinate Foundation board members if we publish certain material, that would be censorship. Everything else is our internal editorial judgement. If we could retire the word "censorship" for matters of editorial judgment, that would be a good thing. Herostratus (talk) 01:58, 30 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

wikt:censorship If a person wants to use the group power (by forming a consensus to do so, which is how the group exercises power on Wikipedia) to control freedom of expression it seems to fit with the definition of censorship. While in the United States the first amendment applies only to government censorship, it does not cease to be censorship when it is someone other then the government enforcing it. Monty ₈₄₅ 02:18, 30 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

..and I'm back...I think what's interesting is to consider where the limits of free speech may be set, beginning with the editorial decisions which are already practised at Wikipedia, and also going beyond that. I surfed through some stuff on the Web this evening to read up on First Amendment rulings by the Supreme Court where they've addressed limitations for constitutional rights in the U.S. Now, there are First Amendment absolutists out there, who maintain the view that there should not be any limits whatsoever on free speech, and they disagree with the various Supreme Court rulings. Personally, I think that the Supreme Court rulings I've perused make sense. I think free speech can be abused and cause harm and injury. (Free speech including images.)

The main bone of contention may be the possibility of third parties gaining control of filtering tools. I haven't seen too much concern being voiced over parents or educators acting as information gatekeepers for kids (I've seen some, but that appears to be a fringe view); so, how to address the potential for governments to abuse such a tool? I would think there are a couple of options: their citizens can object to the government's censoring activity, and push for changes; or, Wikipedia and the rest of Wikimedia could pull out of countries where governments refuse to stop the censoring activities. Governments worldwide already have the means to impose censorship and abuse other types of media. They do the same with the Web. I wish there was more focus on figuring out ways of responding to that reality, rather than fighting to maintain the status quo, and prevent the introduction of new Wikipedia tools that could help educators, and libraries, and parents, and probably other institutions as well.

Monty: Censorship in the broadest possible definition, perhaps could be used to refer to any attempt to squash dialogue, impose groupthink, silence dissent and minority opinions, you are right.

OttawaAC (talk) 02:29, 30 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The question here is do we want schools censoring our content, and the answer is no. If Wikipedia wanted to censor its content from children then it would do so itself. If schools or other editors wish to censor Wikipedia's content from themselves, then they are free to develop their own software to do this, but other editors on Wikipedia and the foundation are not obliged to develop software or a mirror server for what would ultimately be harmful to the project(forking content, splitting editors, lowering accessibility of our content + discouraging editing from those schools, etc). If such software did exist then it would be open for all to use(and misuse), including workplaces banning content, colleges banning content, different nations removing culturally insensitive info, etc. You can discuss what you want, but there won't be much incentive for others to discuss it if neither you or anybody else are actually planning to create it.AerobicFox (talk) 03:36, 30 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Regarding shocking medical photos, there's an occasional problem where pages on medical issues sometimes use a photo of a very serious case of a condition, rather than a milder but more typical one. This isn't about censorship but about giving a false impression of the severity of a condition, both to sufferers and people who encounter sufferers. Some articles are good - e.g. eczema has a mild case at the top with more serious ones later - but occasionally editors seem to select the most horrific or impressive photo, rather than one that reflects most people's experience of a disease. This might be included in a policy statement somewhere, but shouldn't require censorship: after all, if you go to a page on a medical condition you should have some idea what you will see (i.e. accurate information and images of the disease). --Colapeninsula (talk) 11:00, 30 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

It's arguable whether photos are necessary or even useful or helpful in Wikipedia articles. Wikipedia is self-described as a general encyclopedia, and not a textbook. Medical textbooks will have photos of extreme cases, like the worst-case scenarios. I browsed through a couple of the more popular medical Websites directed at general audiences, and notice that there are very few images included in the articles. The Mayo Clinic Website only appears to have photos to illustrate skin conditions, and these are relatively non-gory close-up images, whereas other medical conditions may have professional diagram illustrations, but usually have no images at all. The WebMD Website has very few photos, and most of the images it does use are posed photos with professional models (although there were some photos of eye conditions, again close-ups and relatively non-gory). So is Wikipedia's editorial direction going to be towards a general audience, or towards anyone wanting advanced specialist knowledge of what extreme medical cases look like? Are there other alternatives, like giving users a filter they can use with categories (like being able to shutter medical images only, etc.)?

AerobicFox: So how is a workplace banning content inappropriate or a "misuse"? No one's employer is obligated to supply them with unfettered Web access to look at material that's irrelevant to doing their job. My office has network security firewalls and filters screening out material according to categories like "arts and culture", "gambling", "nudity", "shopping", "tasteless", and some other ones; we also cannot access streaming media like video clips; if I'm reading a news Website, and I click on a headline that has a keyword blocked by the filter, I can't read the article. So what?? That's well within the employer's legal rights to do that. Web access on the job is a perk not a right.

In addition to free speech, people have other civil rights that need to be weighed against that, like the right of parents, schools and schoolboards to educate their kids as they see fit (kids don't have automatic rights to unfettered information in a school environment, or anywhere; the U.S. Constitution mentions that minors' rights are not the same as adults' rights). And what about freedom of religion? See, the argument that people that practise certain religions might filter content for their own use is fine by me (as long as their government isn't doing it, in violation of their own freedom of religion laws); if looking at pictures depicting the Prophet Mohammed is blasphemy to someone, I don't think the views of non-believers should be forced upon believers.

I'm against government censorship of free speech and free flow of ideas, and I would want steps to be taken to anticipate and prevent that from happening. But, I'm not supportive of efforts to force every scrap of information on people who aren't inclined to choose to look at it, I like giving people choices and options.

OttawaAC (talk) 23:09, 30 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Multi language cross referencing....‏

Linking to articles on the same subject in other languages...

I have often noticed that in many cases some of the subjects of my searches in English come up with a small article, when compared to articles that are much larger in other languages. I have many areas of interest and can translate many European languages, but it sometimes really stymies me when I look for something, that is non-existent or sparse in the English wikipedia, only to find there is a huge article in another language. It would be massively useful if the search could link across the languages and report – “no nothing found in English, but a page exists in {insert wiki language here} as such things can be easily translated via google /alta vista etc. by those not fluent in that tongue. Also letting me know that another version of wikipedia has a an article or indeed a more extensive article than the UK version may spur me to translate and edit/update the UK entry to include the expanded knowledge in the other languages, something I am easily able to do for myself, and would love to be able to do for others who do not share such linguistic ability.

My major gripe is that having come up with a blank or a stub in English , I do not know which language to try next and have to start with my favourites and expand outwards. It would make life so much easier if wikipedia could say “French article is 1,000 words long, followed by German at 800 and spanish at 600 and ...” etc. etc. then I could read them all and re-write a full English version expanding on the new info gained from the other entries! And also such an index would allow other people fluent in their home tongues amongst others to expand on articles in other languages. Feel free to add to this if you have more precise ideas on this. This to me is one of the only shortcomings to making wikipedia a global, cross referenced encyclopedia. Feel free to shout me down !

Archangel9769 (talk) 10:49, 30 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

If you run into a situation such as you describe, I'd suggest adding an appropriate template to the article's talk page from the following category: Category:Expand by language Wikipedia templates. That way other editors may have some idea how to proceed.

I suppose another alternative is to allow the 'class' rating labels to be visible under the article's Languages list. Regards, RJH (talk) 17:34, 30 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

A peer review thank you template to incentivize, reward, and quantify helpful peer reviews

I was lucky enough to have an article I worked on peer reviewed by the amazing User:Finetooth, who has contributed to 830 peer reviews. Currently, there's a bit of a backlog, and I was thinking peer reviews are something we could use more of on Wikipedia. Right now, people can use their numbers of DYKs, GAs, FAs, barnstars, etc. to quantity their productivity. I'm thinking a peer review thank you template (similar to a DYK recognition) could be another way to log progress and to reward editors. An editor who receives a review would have the option to give the reviewer the award if they found the review particularly helpful. Jesanj (talk) 17:47, 30 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Annual Survey?

Perhaps it is time, if hasn't been mentioned already, to suggest the idea of an annual survey of dedicated editors? (As defined by some minimum number of edits; say 100+.) The idea being to try and evaluate long-term editing trends, both positive and negative, regarding Wikipedia content, processes, discussions, and administrative practices among the core population of editors. Perhaps a set of questions can be proposed by the general editing population, which can then be trimmed down to a limited set of high value topics (so as not to overwhelm the target audience)? Results can then be reported in the Signpost. Regards, RJH (talk) 17:52, 30 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Google's N-gram machine

There must be something we can do with this kind of data, surely? More on the facility here. --bodnotbod (talk) 21:43, 30 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

What would you suggest doing with those data that would help us in the task of building an encyclopedia? Phil Bridger (talk) 21:50, 30 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

@@ Line 364: / Line 364: @@
 :Regarding shocking medical photos, there's an occasional problem where pages on medical issues sometimes use a photo of a very serious case of a condition, rather than a milder but more typical one.  This isn't about censorship but about giving a false impression of the severity of a condition, both to sufferers and people who encounter sufferers.  Some articles are good - e.g. [[eczema]] has a mild case at the top with more serious ones later - but occasionally editors seem to select the most horrific or impressive photo, rather than one that reflects most people's experience of a disease. This might be included in a policy statement somewhere, but shouldn't require censorship: after all, if you go to a page on a medical condition you should have some idea what you will see (i.e. accurate information and images of the disease). --[[User:Colapeninsula|Colapeninsula]] ([[User talk:Colapeninsula|talk]]) 11:00, 30 September 2011 (UTC)
+:It's arguable whether photos are necessary or even useful or helpful in Wikipedia articles. Wikipedia is self-described as a general encyclopedia, and not a textbook. Medical textbooks will have photos of extreme cases, like the worst-case scenarios. I browsed through a couple of the more popular medical Websites directed at general audiences, and notice that there are very few images included in the articles. [http://www.mayoclinic.com/health-information/ The Mayo Clinic] Website only appears to have photos to illustrate skin conditions, and these are relatively non-gory close-up images, whereas other medical conditions may have professional diagram illustrations, but usually have no images at all. The [http://www.webmd.com/ WebMD] Website has very few photos, and most of the images it does use are posed photos with professional models (although there were some photos of eye conditions, again close-ups and relatively non-gory). So is Wikipedia's editorial direction going to be towards a general audience, or towards anyone wanting advanced specialist knowledge of what extreme medical cases look like? Are there other alternatives, like giving users a filter they can use with categories (like being able to shutter medical images only, etc.)?
+:AerobicFox: So how is a workplace banning content inappropriate or a "misuse"? No one's employer is obligated to supply them with unfettered Web access to look at material that's irrelevant to doing their job. My office has network security firewalls and filters screening out material according to categories like "arts and culture", "gambling", "nudity", "shopping", "tasteless", and some other ones; we also cannot access streaming media like video clips; if I'm reading a news Website, and I click on a headline that has a keyword blocked by the filter, I can't read the article. So what?? That's well within the employer's legal rights to do that. Web access on the job is a perk not a right.
+:In addition to free speech, people have other civil rights that need to be weighed against that, like the right of parents, schools and schoolboards to educate their kids as they see fit (kids don't have automatic rights to unfettered information in a school environment, or anywhere; the U.S. Constitution mentions that minors' rights are not the same as adults' rights). And what about freedom of religion? See, the argument that people that practise certain religions might filter content for their '''own''' use is fine by me (as long as their government isn't doing it, in violation of their own freedom of religion laws); if looking at pictures depicting the Prophet Mohammed is blasphemy to someone, I don't think the views of non-believers should be forced upon believers.
+:I'm against government censorship of free speech and free flow of ideas, and I would want steps to be taken to anticipate and prevent that from happening. But, I'm not supportive of efforts to force every scrap of information on people who aren't inclined to choose to look at it, I like giving people choices and options.
+[[User:OttawaAC|OttawaAC]] ([[User talk:OttawaAC|talk]]) 23:09, 30 September 2011 (UTC)
 ==  Multi language cross referencing....‏ ==