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New ideas and proposals are discussed here. Before submitting:

Check to see whether your proposal is already described at Perennial proposals. You may also wish to search the FAQ.
Consider developing your proposal at the idea lab.
Proposed software changes should be filed at Phabricator (configuration changes should have gained a consensus).
Proposed policy changes belong at Wikipedia:Village pump (policy).
Proposed WikiProjects or task forces may be submitted at Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Proposals.
Proposed new wikis belong at meta:Proposals for new projects.
Proposed new articles belong at Wikipedia:Requested articles.

« Archives, 192, 193, 194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211, 212

Pending Changes bot

Would it be feasible to make a bot that would monitor Pending Changes articles and automatically report them to WP:RFPP when a certain ratio of an article's recent edits are reversions of pending changes? This came up in this discussion, where a page sat with pending for about two years an from the looks of it, almost every edit for the past 200 or so have been reversions of pending changes.

Doesn't seems terribly important what the initial ratio is as long as it errs on the low side. If 100% are protected by admins the standard can be adjusted to reduce false negatives until there is a noticeable effect. TimothyJosephWood 21:18, 6 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

It should probably be feasable; the place where you would need to discuss this would probably be at Wikipedia:Bot requests. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 04:46, 7 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

OTOH, this would be the better venue to try to establish consensus for such a bot. Anomie ⚔ 22:12, 9 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Animals don't adapt.

Animals don't adapt. A lot of articles just matter-of-factedly state things like "animals can adapt to [...]". It's just plain wrong. Animals don't adapt, animals are adapted. These errors should really be seen to. UtherPendrogn (talk) 19:48, 7 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Please provide scholarly sources which say so. Staszek Lem (talk) 20:48, 7 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

And especially don't make edits like this:[1][2] without citation to scholarly sources which back up your rather *cough* unusual opinions about whether species adapt to environmental changes. --Guy Macon (talk) 22:00, 7 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Without a specific context a general context for your comment must be assumed. And in a general context, your comment is false. Animals can adapt. Animals adapt (i.e., change their behavior) all the time to suit the current environment. I suspect you are referring to "adapt" in terms of evolutionary change of species and in that regard you have a point but without specific examples, I'm be unwilling make any general statement like it's always incorrect to say "Animals adapt". Language has a surprisingly large amount of flexibility. I can perfectly well imagine sentences where somebody writes "Animals adapt" and they are using the word "animal" as a direct synonym for "species" and saying "species adapt" is surely not objectionable. There's lots of play here possible with the semantics, especially if the word "animal" is referring to an individual or a species. Your proposal doesn't seem fleshed out enough for serious consideration. Anyway, I can't imagine that there are so many instances that you cannot tackle this as a personal issue. WP:Be Bold and fix it. Jason Quinn (talk) 18:09, 8 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

They shouldn't be so bold as to "fix it" without strong cited source support. Obvious enough to you and me, apparently not so obvious to the OP. ―Mandruss ☎ 19:25, 8 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Adapted by whom, one wonders? Chuntuk (talk) 13:24, 10 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

It is usually best to avoid the passive tense unless the subject of the sentence is implicit. For example do not say "animals were adapted," say "x adapted the animals." Which raises the question, who or what adapted the animals? TFD (talk) 03:18, 11 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

The passive should be used when the subject is unknown, unknowable or irrelevant. Consider: "the starting gun was fired and the runners surged forward...", no one cares or knows who fired the gun. Using a dislike of the passive to try to imply that a conciousness is required to drive evolution is a poor bit of rhetoric. Martin of Sheffield (talk) 08:59, 11 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

It is explicit that the person firing the gun is a race official, because of the reaction of the unnamed runners. Compare your wording with "a gun was fired and the people fled in terror..." In that case we expect that at some point the writer will explain something about the identity of the gunman. TFD (talk) 08:16, 13 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

err, that should be IMplicit. In your example there is no reason to assume that within the sentence the identity will be revealed. Indeed, perhaps the identity cannot be known, all that is important is the stampede occurred. Martin of Sheffield (talk) 09:50, 13 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Rate Limit for All Users

Per the obvious vandalbot contributions of Special:Contributions/Knowledgekid666, why hasn't en.wiki placed a rate limit on all users, whether IP all the way through admin? To me, that would make sense. --MuZemike 02:52, 9 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

That would, IMO, be a major overreaction. Yes these things may happen sometimes but I think the people on this site, the community as it were, need to find a threshold of risk they are willing to accept for this sort of thing. It's a public and open site for the most part so I think we need to accept that occasionally, in that type of environment, these things will happen. When they do, we deal with them accordingly, not limit otherwise trustworthy users just in case and limit the amount of improvements are done in Wikipedia. That, to me, would be far worse and would have far greater impact than simply blocking and reverting the edits of the occasional vandal. Mr. Nosferatu (talk) 03:11, 9 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

No need to rate restrict everyone to get rid of this, just remove (or limit) Twinkle's ability to do global unlinking. I've seen other vandals using Twinkle to do this exact same thing, and in my opinion it's just too dangerous a feature to have unrestricted. Meters (talk) 03:31, 9 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I regularly edit pages in groups of 64 open tabs (things like replacing "The the" with "The" or "the") and then submit all my changes in rapid succession. A global rate limit would inconvenience me. --Guy Macon (talk) 03:55, 9 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I do the same thing as Guy Macon. If you look in my contributions, you'll see edit rates as high as ten per minute when I am running an easy script with no false positives. I open all of the pages in tabs, run the script on each one, then quickly look through the proposed edits and save them in quick succession. I inspect every edit before saving. Rate limits should probably be listed on Wikipedia:Perennial_proposals; I have seen it come up a few times. – Jonesey95 (talk) 15:41, 11 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

List of redirects

Perhaps for any article, under tools (on the left sidebar) there should be a "list of redirects" that list what redirects there, while what links here can suffice for smaller or less used articles, some articles have thousands of things that link to them, and having a dedicated list for redirects could help. Iazyges Consermonor Opus meum 04:57, 9 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@Iazyges: You've already got it. Click "What links here", then above the list you should see a line "External tools: Show redirects only". Click that link. --Redrose64 (talk) 09:14, 9 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I want to ask a question.

how can i display

confirmed by password
- Indicates that the local account was merged because the user specified a valid password for it.

on Special:CentralAuth on 'method'???--주발사 (talk) 12:59, 10 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

This is not the right venue for this question - ever since WP:SUL was rolled out this is not really applicable to the English Wikipedia anymore. If you have general questions about CentralAuth for other projects you can read more here mw:Extension:CentralAuth. — xaosflux ^Talk 01:43, 11 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedian Effectiveness Training

Does community health at Wikipedia concern you? Do you belief communication between Wikipedians can be improved? I started a grant proposal to develop and deliver a Wikipedian Effectiveness Training. Feel free to endorse or comment the proposal at Grants:Project/Wikipedian Effectiveness Training. Ad Huikeshoven (talk) 17:51, 10 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Require consensus for candidate article edits through the election.

We're in the midst of the silly season, where people imagine they can influence the outcomes of various elections by editing the Wikipedia articles of the candidates. This leads to a tremendous amount of edits attempting to add or remove content believed to be helpful or harmful - whether this material is poorly sourced or not sourced at all, non-notable, overly newsy, presented incompletely, etc. I therefore propose that until the conclusion of the voting which these edits seek to influence, all edits to Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Mike Pence, Tim Kaine, and, frankly, any other political candidate likely to be subject to this sort of treatment should require consensus for inclusion before any edit is made to the article on that subject. I would remind editors that we are writing a long term project, not an election flyer. I would further note that our articles on these subjects are alreday very well-developed and informative, so there is no rush to repair real deficiencies. bd2412 T 23:40, 10 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I think first we should try to address the root of the problem. News media for better or worse has portrayed Clinton in a better light than her competitors - Sanders, Trump, Johnson and Stein, and therefore we should expect that the relevant articles do as well, per neutrality. But some supporters of Clinton's opponents think we should redress what they see as media bias, which is against policy. Similarly, some Clinton supporters think we should remove negative information covered in the media because they do not think it is "relevant." Is there any way we can ensure that policies are followed in editing these articles? TFD (talk) 00:22, 11 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose - Discretionary sanctions are in place at all articles mentioned. I haven't visited others in a while, but the DS appear to be working adequately at Trump. If they fail to work adequately, it can only be because they are not being adequately enforced. ―Mandruss ☎ 00:26, 11 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Some of the candidate articles are not under the same restrictions as other candidate articles. --Elvey^(t•c) 06:21, 14 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, but Oppose any prior restraint. If people have to get advance consent before any article edits then article improvement would grind completely to a halt, if it hasn't already. Might as well just edit protect all the articles. I think a little more vigilance is in order for tendentious edits: editors must obtain consensus before any significant edit they know or ought to know to be disputed. If they keep doing it, then warnings and sanctions apply. Also, clarify that whereas BRD are okay, BRRD is not. - Wikidemon (talk) 00:37, 11 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose. I do genuinely appreciate the spirit behind the proposal, but discretionary sanctions + a rigorous adherence to BLP, RS, V, and BRD should be sufficient here. In other words, we should rigorously enforce the content policies we already have. I also find "all edits" to be very broad - what about ref fixes, general copy edits, typo fixes, adding wikilinks, and so forth? Neutrality^talk 01:51, 11 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose- I can only speak for editing patterns at the Donald Trump article. Not needed. Sanctions and watchful editors are in place. Buster Seven Talk 02:49, 11 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose There is no need for this. Semi-protection eliminates most of the silly stuff; discretionary sanctions (eventually) take care of POV warring. The articles I am active at (mostly Trump related) are closely watched and they seem to be operating fairly civilly, with the talk page in use for anything controversial. Routine editing, updating, correcting etc. is being done responsibly. A few timely topic bans have also been helpful. A look at the Clinton article suggests it is a little more problematic, but people seem to be dealing with the problems efficiently. --MelanieN (talk) 03:03, 11 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose. Our typical WP:BRD process works fine here, and why turn away potential new editors when they could learn something and begin to edit productively? I created an account over a year ago because I saw a TfD notice within the infobox of a random comedian article and I disagreed with it at the time. It wouldn't be that weird for someone to come here for political reasons and choose to stick around productively. ~ Rob₁₃^Talk 03:14, 11 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose — I have been watching the Donald Trump article and his campaign article for months and there have been only minor problems. There is no reason to hamper editors who are trying to make legitimate edits.--Jack Upland (talk) 04:42, 11 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose. I appreciate the user's frustration, but I quite often make a series of changes to improve the Mike Pence article, all during within a few minutes of each other, and it would be harmful to the project to have to wait between them. So far, none of my changes have been reverted. BeenAroundAWhile (talk) 17:41, 11 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Mixed support. How many subjects with $125M in brand value at stake have made a point of showing how (overly?) litigious they are? True, the project doesn't worry about editors "influencing the outcomes of elections" -- nor should it -- but it does worry about editors accidentally influencing a subject's brand value. Let's start with the infobox. Citing Forbes, it says Trump's net worth decreased last year. Bloomberg says it increased. If people vote based on what they read here, that's their problem; what if they invest based on it? Can I propose a friendly amendment? --Dervorguilla (talk) 08:05, 12 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

[Supplement]: A (modest) majority of editors at Donald Trump do appear to agree with TFD that the article should proportionately represent views published by the media they trust. Only a minority would appear to discount views published by objectively disreputable or non-mainstream media. To illustrate: BBC, WSJ, ABC, USA Today, and Economist have been shown to be reputable and ideologically mainstream; New Yorker, Guardian, HuffPo, Politico, and Fox have been shown to be neither. Donald Trump lists 51 references from the first group, 54 from the second (25 from Politico alone). The article may be tagged for verifiability.

[Proposed friendly amendment]: That all questionable claims in the lead sections of these four articles be sourced and vetted, for the duration. --Dervorguilla (talk) 23:52, 12 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@Dervorguilla: How does that differ from WP:V? ―Mandruss ☎ 07:24, 13 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@Mandruss: I'm proposing that we (and others) tag or remove material that fails WP:V because the source isn't a respected mainstream publication. We could conveniently start with the known nonmainstream sources listed above. --Dervorguilla (talk) 10:12, 13 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@Dervorguilla: - Interesting concept, but I don't know how much agreement there is on the definition of "mainstream". I'm an old guy so "mainstream" is pretty much a synonym for "traditional, old school, establishment, plus the big three cable news channels". Someone half my age might feel very differently about that, and some solid journalism is occurring on the web. I have my strong opinions about Fox, but I've never actually seen anyone challenge them as a reliable source. But I'm all for tightening up sourcing requirements in principle. ―Mandruss ☎ 10:30, 13 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@Mandruss: Actually, the current WP:V sourcing requirements already seem rather tight:

"Editors may use material from reliable non-academic sources, particularly if it appears in respected mainstream publications. [Such] other reliable sources include: ... * Mainstream newspapers". (WP:SOURCE.)

"Red flags that should prompt extra caution include: * ... apparently important claims not covered by multiple mainstream sources." (WP:REDFLAG.)

"The label "Mainstream media" [is] generally applied to publications, such as newspapers and magazines, that contain the highest readership among the public." (Mainstream.)

"mainstream. Used or accepted broadly rather than by small portions of a population or market." Wiktionary.

If you look up "Trust Levels of News Sources by Ideological Group", in Political Polarization and Media Habits, you can actually confirm which of these are mainstream: WSJ, TheBlaze, Guardian, or Politico. --Dervorguilla (talk) 02:09, 14 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose The best analog is an article on breaking news, like the Sandy Hook shooting. I've actually worked the talk page for those kinds of articles, which are arguably more intense but for just a week or two. What I've found is that the non-admin do a pretty good job of policing the page and working together so the article only needs a little admin oversight to use the tools when consensus is being ignored. If it gets overwhelmed with problematic edits, we can always temporarily full protect and have an admin copy over from the talk page to the main page, after a consensus is found. Forcing a verbal consensus is a burden and will mean uncontentious and worthwhile edits will get left out. Dennis Brown - 2¢ 22:19, 12 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Support I PROPOSE: uniform protection on (i.e. edit notices on) all candidate articles. (In particular Basic discretionary sanctions + 1RR.) Oppose the BD proposal; we already have people deleting good stuff based on WP:IDONTLIKEIT, and it staying deleted because gaming is so common. --Elvey^(t•c) 06:21, 14 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Proposal: Amend page title element to remove "Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia"

Change implemented

– See Special:Diff/743970452 by MSGJ (talk · contribs). Mz7 (talk) 02:19, 13 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

A discussion on VPP [3] notes that when a wikipedia page is saved, the default filename, derived from the page's <title></title> value, will be in the form Article Name - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The suggestion is that this is a bit of a pain, and that Article Name - Wikipedia would better suffice.

This proposal is to amend MediaWiki:Pagetitle such that Wikipedia pagenames are amended as follows:

from: Article Name - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
to: Article Name - Wikipedia

Please indicate support/opposition below and/or discuss. thanks --Tagishsimon (talk) 00:01, 11 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Strong Support. We already have "Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia" on every page (look at the globe at the upper left). Adding it to other places feels sort of spammy. --Guy Macon (talk) 01:15, 11 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

...and keep the hyphen as being standard ASCII and thus more friendly to operating systems and screen readers for the blind. --Guy Macon (talk) 22:25, 12 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Support - for conciseness, and because most of the world already knows by now that Wikipedia is the (a?) free encyclopedia. ―Mandruss ☎ 05:02, 11 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Strong Support. - and not only for conciseness, but also for consistency -- Wikipedia articles in most other languages manage well without the extra-long tag. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 78.143.206.161 (talk • contribs) 08:39, 11 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Support These titles end up in browser tabs. Short titles are much more workable. The free encyclopedia doesn't really add information, so no need to repeat it in every tab title. Jahoe (talk) 11:03, 11 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Support, but change the hyphen - to an en dash – as well. (Hyphen is stylistically inappropriate here.) Jc86035 (talk) Use {{re|Jc86035}}
to reply to me 11:26, 11 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Jc86035 — en-dashes are not allowed in file-names on a number of operating systems, so we cannot do that. Carl Fredrik 💌 📧 13:47, 11 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@CFCF: French Wikipedia uses an em dash Article — Wikipédia… In addition, there are quite a number of articles which already use en- or em-dashes in their titles. How is en-dashes not being allowed in filenames an issue? Jc86035 (talk) Use {{re|Jc86035}}
to reply to me 13:53, 11 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Well, one of the rationales is based on the user saving a page to their computer. I'm generally not in favor of fixing one thing and simultaneously breaking another... Wouldn't a comma be even more stylistically accurate? Carl Fredrik 💌 📧 13:59, 11 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

A comma makes it sound like a place name… I guess if it's really that problematic (are there that many people who download Wikipedia articles?), it's probably better to just keep the hyphen until Windows XP dies. Jc86035 (talk) Use {{re|Jc86035}}
to reply to me 14:08, 11 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Support, and keep the hyphen. Ideally file names should be basic 7-bit ASCII for portability and long term storage. Keep the typographically correct fancy formatting for inside the articles. Martin of Sheffield (talk) 14:23, 11 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Support in general. Indifferent to the hyphen. It's an annoyance I've encountered and I'm glad someone thought to propose an actionable change. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 18:12, 11 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Support. As stylistically redundant. GenQuest ^{"Talk to Me"} 23:31, 11 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Support. - my "devil's advocate" failed to find any solid reason for the longer version. Staszek Lem (talk) 01:46, 12 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Support. It's unlikely that any reader of citations would not know what Wikipedia is. S a g a C i t y (talk) 06:23, 12 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Based on the unanimous support shown here, I have made the change — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 09:11, 12 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Definitely not trying to change the decision already made, but I wanted to offer some additional information, for those of you interested. After deep research with potential readers in Mexico, India, and Nigeria, we learned that there's a huge lack of awareness/understanding of Wikipedia (for example, 75% of respondents in India had never heard of Wikipedia). This means that people are reading Wikipedia content without knowing where it came from - a great use of the content, but it doesn't let them distinguish the value of neutral POV, un-commercially biased content from the rest of the internet. And people who don't know Wikipedia have no ability or opportunity to become editors. We also know that most of our traffic in these countries (particularly in Nigeria and India) are in English because of the lack of local language content on the internet (not just Wikipedia). I don't think the old page title had much to contribute to this, but figured you might want to know. AGomez (WMF) (talk) 21:26, 12 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Support The portion "the free encyclopedia" is what Wikipedia is, saving a page only need tell you what the article is and where it came from. The full tag isn't helpful for saved pages. Dennis Brown - 2¢ 22:09, 12 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Support Current form is redundant. Couldn't care less about the dash v hyphen debate. -Ad Orientem (talk) 22:20, 12 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Comment – Has the change already been made? I notice that when I hover my cursor over Wikipedia tabs, they now just display "Wikipedia" instead of "Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia". Dustin (talk) 22:42, 12 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Ah, I see that my question has already been answered above. The change has indeed already been made. Dustin (talk) 22:44, 12 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@MSGJ: A consensus in a day? Since when we just close a discussion that lasts 24 hours when it affects every page? I question that this is an adequate decision and any requirement for a SNOW call or a speedy close. <sigh> There is a courtesy that should be extended to the general populace to allow opinion to be expressed. — billinghurst sDrewth 03:56, 15 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

You honestly think that leaving it open would have resulted in a different outcome? --Guy Macon (talk) 06:04, 15 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

It would have given time to examine some more potential issues. This discussion is all about saved filenames and browser tabs (with some votes possibly being made on the assumption that this would only affect filenames), and doesn't explicitly touch on search engine results, which is a huge part of how Wikipedia fits into the web. A link titled Goldfish - from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia makes it clear to an uninformed searcher that this clicks through to an encyclopedia article, but Goldfish - Wikipedia doesn't. I don't know how much we can safely assume that everyone searching for information on the web will know what Wikipedia is, but as User:AGomez (WMF) observes, "75% of respondents in India had never heard of Wikipedia". --McGeddon (talk) 07:56, 15 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with this. The discussion was not open long enough for enough people to get a say on something that everyone will notice. I've had to find this thread after seeing the title change because I want to oppose it, but I can't because that tiny discussion period is apparently adequate. As such I would ask that the change is undone for now and this matter is opened to the wider community as an RfC. Rcsprinter₁₂₃ (face) 12:06, 15 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

You are free to erect an RfC, Rcsprinter. There doesn't seem a good reason for the change to be undone whilst you're about that. On you go. --Tagishsimon (talk) 12:13, 15 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I think the fact that the discussion was snowballed before touching on the serious topic of how Wikipedia appears in inbound links is big enough that the discussion should continue here. We certainly have a snowball consensus for the new title being, as proposed, an easy fix for how saving articles as HTML can be "a bit of a pain", but there's been no discussion of whether it's a good or bad idea for Wikipedia links to stop describing themselves as being from "the free encyclopedia" in search engine results and social media shares. --McGeddon (talk) 18:34, 15 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I agree that there wasn't sufficient time for people to comment on this before it was implemented. I'd second the issues brought up above, and another annoying outcome of this change is that people who like to save copies of web pages they find useful in preparation for them disappearing or being destructively changed in the future suddenly find that when they save an updated version of any Wikipedia page, it no longer overwrites the old copy and they have to go manually delete the old one to prevent confusion and avoid wasting disk space. --Dan Harkless (talk) 11:37, 16 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Comment: Having the words "the free encyclopedia" in incoming links is unnecessary and a bit spammy (as in "that which low quality sites that are desperate to get high rankings in the search engines tend to do"). Even if someone doesn't know what Wikipedia is, the link takes them to a page with a cute little globe that says "Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia" under it. When a non-spammer cites something (here or on other sites) that comes from the NYT, they make the text of the link "The New York Times", not "The New York Times - Breaking News, World News & Multimedia". Links to Reddit should say "Reddit" or perhaps "Reddit.com", not "reddit: the front page of the internet". (examples taken from the actual page titles of those two sites). Simpler is better. --Guy "when you want help from someone with a three letter name that starts with 'G' but don't want to bother any actual deities" Macon (talk) 01:36, 16 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

RFC on deferred changes

There is now a RFC on whether to implement deferred changes. Please comment at Wikipedia:Deferred changes/Request for comment 2016. Cenarium (talk) 09:05, 14 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia:WikiProject Africa/The Africa Destubathon

Proposing that people sign up for this ;-) One last invite. If anybody wants to win up to $1800 (£1500) (in Amazon vouchers and subscriptions etc) for fleshing out a few African stubs this autumn sign up and help out! There's a chance to win a prize for most destubs for each African country, so 55 chances to win something, $1100 for that max. Then larger prizes for most geography/wildlife, women, core stubs and Good Article produced during the whole contest! People who win enough can get British Library, JSTOR and other subscriptions they want. Even if not interested in prizes any help is appreciated. Hope people here see that it is a good cause. It starts in just over two hours time and lasts until November 27th!♦ Dr. Blofeld 20:43, 14 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@@ Line 157: / Line 157: @@
 :::::::I think the fact that the discussion was snowballed before touching on the serious topic of how Wikipedia appears in inbound links is big enough that the discussion should continue here. We certainly have a snowball consensus for the new title being, as proposed, an easy fix for how saving articles as HTML can be "a bit of a pain", but there's been no discussion of whether it's a good or bad idea for Wikipedia links to stop describing themselves as being from "the free encyclopedia" in search engine results and social media shares. --[[User:McGeddon|McGeddon]] ([[User talk:McGeddon|talk]]) 18:34, 15 October 2016 (UTC)
+::::::::I agree that there wasn't sufficient time for people to comment on this before it was implemented.  I'd second the issues brought up above, and another annoying outcome of this change is that people who like to save copies of web pages they find useful in preparation for them disappearing or being destructively changed in the future suddenly find that when they save an updated version of any Wikipedia page, it no longer overwrites the old copy and they have to go manually delete the old one to prevent confusion and avoid wasting disk space.  --[[User:Dan Harkless|Dan Harkless]] ([[User talk:Dan Harkless|talk]]) 11:37, 16 October 2016 (UTC)
 *  '''Comment:''' Having the words "the free encyclopedia" in incoming links is unnecessary and a bit spammy (as in "that which low quality sites that are desperate to get high rankings in the search engines tend to do"). Even if someone doesn't know what Wikipedia is, the link takes them to a page with a cute little globe that says "Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia" under it. When a non-spammer cites something (here or on other sites) that comes from the NYT, they make the text of the link "The New York Times", not "The New York Times - Breaking News, World News & Multimedia". Links to Reddit should say "Reddit" or perhaps "Reddit.com", not "reddit: the front page of the internet". (examples taken from the actual page titles of those two sites). Simpler is better. --[[User:Guy Macon|Guy "when you want help from someone with a three letter name that starts with 'G' but don't want to bother any actual deities" Macon]] ([[User talk:Guy Macon|talk]]) 01:36, 16 October 2016 (UTC)