Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Wikipedia technical issues and templates

The following discussions are requested to have community-wide attention:

Wikipedia:VisualEditor/VisualEditor default state 2014 part 1

VisualEditor was deployed to English Wikipedia in the middle of 2013. It was later removed after two community Requests for Comment, Wikipedia:VisualEditor/RFC and Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Default State RFC. Changes have been made to VisualEditor since the VisualEditor was removed. The English Wikipedia page Wikipedia:VisualEditor says that "The Wikimedia Foundation developers expect to make it available to almost all Wikimedia Foundation projects by the end of 2014" although the latest I have heard is that the Foundation is not rushing to push this project onto English Wikipedia against community consensus and "there is no 'official plan' at all with regard to the English Wikipedia".

This request for comment asks the community what additional changes or fixes we want WMF to make before we would consider re-enabling VisualEditor under a set of conditions that we could specify through a later RfC such as Wikipedia:VisualEditor/2014 RFC or User:Pine/drafts/VisualEditor default state 2014 part 2.

I am not personally voting in this request for comment but I may make comments, probably responding to any points about the format of the RfC, the close of the RfC, or future action to be taken after the close. --Pine^✉ 07:35, 7 June 2014 (UTC)

Template talk:WPBannerMeta

I propose that the flag |attention= be removed from {{WPBannerMeta}}. This is a flag that seemed to have its heyday around 2007, and its use has been declining ever since. It adds "This article has been marked as needing immediate attention" to the banner, and puts the talk page in a subcategory of Category:Articles needing attention. It has the following disadvantages:

• No one really knows what to do with it. I have looked at about 50 flagged articles, and the issues have generally been: needs expanding, needs sources, or needs an expert.
• A lot of the time, though, I can't tell what the reason for the flag is. There is rarely a detailed explanation.
• For every issue that I can think of that needs immediate attention, there is an article tag that would serve better. Or a wikiproject talk page.
• It is on the talk page, so if the problem is fixed, people tend to forget to remove the tag. So years later, there it still is.
• Few people look at the categories (which is why so many of the articles have been there since 2007).

At best, this flag just clutters up the talk page. At worst, the user might apply it to a problem that actually does need immediate attention, thinking it will make a difference. It won't. RockMagnetist (talk) 03:00, 1 June 2014 (UTC)

Help talk:Citation Style 1

All parameter names in Citation Style 1 templates shall include at least an alias which is in lowercase that has separations with hyphens between English words, between (not within) acronyms, or between English words and acronyms. The documentation is to show this lowercase, hyphenated version as the one for "normal use". This is to establish a parameter name format that is uniformly available for all CS1 templates. Establishing this uniform parameter name convention does not preclude the existence of any other alias for a parameter, merely that a lowercase, hyphenated version will exist for each parameter.—D'Ranged 1 ^VTalk 22:10, 24 May 2014 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Media Viewer/June 2014 RfC