Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)

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

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

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Before posting your proposal:

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

Proposals archive

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

Semiprotected status

Wikiproject: Wikipedia:WikiProject Semiprotect

I believe that there should be a kind of page protection on Wikipedia, which, instead of blocking all non-admins, only blocks anonymous users, or anonymous users and accounts that are (say) less than a week old. The vast, vast majority of the on vandalism persistent wikipedia comes from anonymous and brand new users, and is usually dealt with by protecting the page. I think that introducing a semiprotected status for pages would help deal with vandalism and spamming without preventing normal editing of the page.

I believe this would require a change to the software (could be wrong) and so I'm testing the waters here before proposing it on bugzilla. Any thoughts? Yelyos July 3, 2005 23:10 (UTC)

Personally, I love the idea. Some pages with a high amount of vandal traffic, such as George W. Bush, could be protected in this sense, while other pages remain completely open to all. Setting up an account on Wikipedia is not a big deal, and I think that a semiprotected page status would save us RC patrolers a LOT of energy. Linuxbeak | Talk | Desk July 3, 2005 23:16 (UTC)

This is proposed practically every 5 minutes. The argument against it is the push-pull effect: the majority of vandals are anonymous because they don't have to register to vandalize. If they did, many of them would. And of course, there are useful anonymous contributions to these articles. There are various other ideas that might be more effective, like a time delay before anonymous changes become visible, or if necessary, some kind of peer review. Deco 3 July 2005 23:25 (UTC)

In response to your comment, I do not believe that the majority of vandals would actually register, because (and I'm taking an educated guess here) the majority of vandals include young, immature adolescent males. Secondly, the articles that most of these vandals target are of a high-profile, and thus protecting those pages from anonymous edits would hinder their efforts. The majority of effort by normal users and administrators on these articles are reverts. You need only to look here and see that while there some anonymous IP addresses that actually made some good edits, the vast majority of said IP addresses are vandals. Let me be frank: if a viewer is hellbent on adding content, that person will find a way. But, let's keep things simple: make the vandals register just like anyone else, and let the administrators block the vandal. Linuxbeak | Talk | Desk July 3, 2005 23:37 (UTC)

I personally also disagree with Deco. Much as we could introduce a time delay, it would still not significantly reduce the work of editors. In fact it would increase it as all edits by anonymous IPs would have to be moderated by people. In fact I would suggest a time delay would be more annoying to genuine non-vandal anonynous editors than what is suggested here (making them log in to edit some high traffic articles). Of course there are useful contributions by anonymous editors (and indeed the vast majority are useful) but, if they had to log in first, it would not reduce the usefulness of their contributions. I understand that some editors of wikipedia do not want to log in, but note that this suggestion does not ask for the wholesale blocking of anonymous users, but instead just a form of protection for particularly highly vandalized pages. As for the comment that the vandals would be just as able to vandalize when logged in, of course this is also true, but blocking a logged in user avoids the complications associated with dynamic IPs and worse, proxies. On frequent occasions, IPs are blocked that are shared by a number of anonymous users - this in itself is preventing a good number of useful edits by people who are blocked through no fault of their own. As such I believe that Yelyos's suggestion is a very good one that will improve Wikipedia both for its editors and readers. I would object to anyone arguing that this acts against the spirit of a wiki as this system would still allow anyone to edit any article (just for some they would need an account). If anything this is actually more wiki-spirited than the current system in which some pages have to be protected against any editing due to vandalism, which benefits no-one. Will => talk 3 July 2005 23:44 (UTC)

This protection status could also protect against accounts that haven't been registered for a week, which would cause vandals with short attention spans (which is most of them) to forget about whatever urge drove them to vandalize in the first place. Also, this would mean that instances of vandalism (barring sockpuppetry, which presumably could be detected within a week) from each person to those pages protected with this status would be reduced to a week. I think this protection status would be most useful in the case of coordinated attacks from external sources on specific wikipedia pages, and would stop those quite effectively while still allowing normal edits to get through. Alternatively (and I am loathe to suggest this, since it's opening a pandora's box) the requirement could be a certain number of edits, enough to weed out vandals. I am not suggesting that controversial articles be protected permanently under this status. I'm simply suggesting that it could be used as a tool to replace the use of temporary full protection in instances where it's warranted. Yelyos July 4, 2005 01:24 (UTC)

I'm not sure. "The encyclopaedia which anyone can edit, barring anons on certain topics" doesn't have the same ring to it. The example of George W. Bush is a bad one; it would only be used, presumably, against cases of vandalism exclusively by anons, such as anon vandal bots. I definetly think that protecting anything which gets vandalised a lot from anons is stupid, as a lot will be put off. Its not "anyone can edit" if anons can't. Hedley 3 July 2005 23:51 (UTC)

I brought this up on IRC; the idea I had was that specific articles (those already prone to vandalism) could be marked (by an admin) as semiprotected (the term I used was hemiprotected as I think there already is a semiprotection status in MediaWiki) that would prohibit edits by anons to that article only. The ability of anons to edit other articles would be unaffected. Anybody who does vandalism patrol has run across the problem of a vandal with a roving IP (or a vandal at AOL or NTL) repeatedly vandalizing the same article in the same way over and over again, that can't be effectively blocked, either because they have a roving IP or because they are on a public proxy that we can't effectively block because doing so blocks thousands of other editors. I consider blocking anons from editing one article for an indefinite time far less damaging than repeatedly blocking thousands of editors (all but one innocent) from editing any articles. Kelly Martin July 4, 2005 00:02 (UTC)

A further follow up: I noticed today on the wikimedia foundation site that certain pages (eg this one) have "edit (requires login)" at the top of the page. This would suggest to me that a change such as the one outlined above could be introduced with very few technical changes, as the software seems to support the basic idea of it. Will => talk 5 July 2005 23:00 (UTC)

That whole wiki is login-only. It's not per-page. --cesarb 5 July 2005 23:22 (UTC)

I presented something like this earlier on. It has vanised for some odd reason. Atricles such as george W bush and many others need a semi protected status. We could put edit quotas to some articles such as george w bush, bill clinton etc. The quota could be for example 100 edits, Would at least slow down vandalism if not halt it. I am not sure if blocking annon users completely off of such articles is good. Some annons contribute a lot. --Cool Cat ^{My Talk} 7 July 2005 13:53 (UTC)

problem would be that you might totally deter someone who was only interested in the high profile page but who had something interesting to say. Asking someone to wait a week is one thing, but asking him to go off and work on 100 different pages first might be rather a big task to be allowed to add your bit. Waiting a week before being allowed to edit a 'protected ' page would not be unreasonable if you look at as a weaker prohibition than banning everyone. You would have to include a time delay, otherwise people would just log on and create thousande of single-use ids which would in itself clog up the system. Would you need a procedure to delete them, because this measure certainly would cause them?Sandpiper 02:04, 10 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I'm somewhat conflicted on the issue. While it's immediately obvious how useful it would be, what worries me is its affect on Wikipedia's social structure. At the moment, there seems to be a de-facto standard that, while you may have to register to participate in policymaking and other meta-stuff, editing can generally be done as easily by anons as by logged in users. Also, currently the only restrictions that have been placed on registered accounts have been for Arbcom/Foundation voting. Would it be wise to implement something that might change this? CXI 03:12, 10 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

The point is not to annoy "good users" but instead annoy and in conviniance vandals that vandalise same articles. Their objective is to destroy an article on a personality or topic they dont like. Such as Abortion, George W. Bush. Some restrictions are necesary. I observed entier wiki data flow long enough (not that its a big thing) to know how often some articles are blanked. See history of George W. Bush. We have the option of locking the article completely or semi locking it. Also on VfD or RfA or RfC cases such a protection is more than beneficial. --Cool Cat ^{My Talk} 12:39, 10 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

It seems that there is overwhelming support for this idea... should we have a petition or something for people to sign in favor of this idea? How and when does it get to the next step towards implementation? --kizzle 18:52, July 10, 2005 (UTC)

I, too, think the "semi-protect" status is a good idea. An anonymous vandal with a dynamic IP can easily dodge bans, whereas one who must create an account has at least that small piece of tediousness to take up his time. A semi-protect status would give Wikipedia admins another, more fine-tuned tool between full open-editing and full non-admin lock. I don't think even semi-protection should be an article's usual state, of course.
Also consider that if a repeat vandal with an IP shared by other people has his IP banned, the ban will also hurt others who use that IP. If he has to create his own account (or accounts) to do his damage, then banning that account will only hurt that user. --Mr. Billion 05:07, 11 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I think it would be a good idea. Almafeta 23:46, 11 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Good idea, but would be even better if we could allow certain anons to edit those pages. Support either way. Bart133 (t) 16:57, 19 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I think this is a great idea. A lot of wikipedians spend a lot of time reverting vandals (myself included), when we could spend it making contributions or reading other's good contributions. --Rogerd 02:14, July 22, 2005 (UTC)

Exterminate Vandals

Monitoring entier wiki data flow for several weeks I noticed several articles such as George W. Bush end up vandalised too frequently. While {Protecting} the article is a very bad idea as we want users to edit articles, putting edit caps on certain frequently vandalised articles maybe usefull. Granted its not absolute protection but it would make first edit vandalisms imposible for such articlers. Dynamic IP's such as various AOL vandals abused (as well as many others) use their IP to vandalise on first edit. --Cool Cat ^{My Talk} 4 July 2005 07:14 (UTC)

What I propose is some sort of an edit cap, number not being outragous, but also being time consuming to achive. Since wikipedia has over 600,000 articles I do not believe people will have difficulty reaching cap. This prevents vandalism by inconviniancing vandals. --Cool Cat ^{My Talk} 4 July 2005 07:14 (UTC)

Users like Evilmonkey, myself and other RC patrolers will revert pages but because of articles like George W. Bush which get vandalisedmultiple times in an hour by a number of IP's at times make RC patrolers job harder each day as more such articles appear. --Cool Cat ^{My Talk} 4 July 2005 07:14 (UTC)

Another possible solution - currently pages may be protected so that only admins may edit them - could a second tier of protection be added somehow, so that at "Level 1 protection" only admins can edit them, and at "Level 2 protection" any registered users can edit them, but anons cannot? That might slow some vandals down a bit... Grutness...wha? 4 July 2005 12:54 (UTC)

Oops - I've just noticed that quite by chance I have suggested something that someone else put forward about a day ago (further up the page). Looks like an idea whose time may have come? Grutness...wha? 4 July 2005 12:57 (UTC)

Seems to me that the time has come for this idea, as I don't see any opposition to it. --kizzle July 9, 2005 19:02 (UTC)

Well, it appears that that vandal has resurfaced. He's been over on the Dick Cheney page posting the same pictures. Huh. Well, guys, it looks like my little plan has caused you to think twice about who can edit the Bush page. By doing my vandal streak this morning, I have succeeded in causing this cebate on whether to limit who can submit contributions to this article. Looks like you just can't keep an old Bush vandal down. Like I said, if you take the other choice, and decide not to allow only registered sers to contribute, then Ill satrt anoter one of the vandal streaks. Even if you do allow only registered members to contribute, I have a couple of registered names, that have existed for quite a while. Let the debates begin! Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:George_W._Bush"

Can someone please stop the Campbellsville, Kentucky, or Elizabethtown, Kentucky, "vandal" who uses ALLTEL Digital Subscriber Line? I don't like Star Wars. It's another damned Hollywood loony-lefty movie. 2004-12-29T22:45Z 01:23, July 10, 2005 (UTC)

I think this has enough support to start a wiki project. --Cool Cat ^{My Talk} 03:04, 27 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Counterproposal (article stability for public consumption)

I tentatively suggest the following for discussion:

- the public face of the wikipedia be placed on a time delay- only versions of articles stable for more than a certain amount (1 day?) will be served to the normal public.

- meanwhile watchlists and edits and logged in editors views will update in realtime.

The idea is that this is an encyclopedia, and hence nothing is supposed to change that quickly, meanwhile the delay gives editors a chance to remove vandalism. Doing this would also discourage vandalism since the vandals wouldn't even see their own edits, and the vandalism gets fixed before any harm was done. Meanwhile, well intentioned edits would go through.WolfKeeper

There are 370,000 users here, and I think most page views are probably by registered users. The vandalism is still going to bother all of us.Superm401 | Talk 05:02, August 7, 2005 (UTC)

Exactly! And the editors are the ones who know how to fix it, and are naturally motivated to do so. Meanwhile the users don't see any problems, so the perception of the wikipedia rises. This idea scales naturally, since the number of editors scales up with the number of users and the number of vandals.WolfKeeper

Therefore, I don't think this is much of a solution. Superm401 | Talk 05:02, August 7, 2005 (UTC)

It's a solution to the problem of perceived accuracy of the wikipedia, not a solution to vandalism. Barring some clever AI, the only solution to vandalism is editors looking and reading and correcting.WolfKeeper

I just thought of something. If it takes a day for a new version to be visible to anons, then if a page is vandalized(or made in accurate or POV or...) and an editor fixes it, the public version will still be inaccurate for the amount of time between the vandalism and fix. I.E.

January 1st-noon-George W. Bush is blanked

January 1st-1:00 P.M.-reverted

Assuming 1 day delay:

January 2nd-noon-blanked version becomes visible

January 2nd-1:00 P.M.-reverted version visible

Either way, the vandalized page is visible for an hour. There is no reasonable way to avoid this as far as I can see. Superm401 | Talk 05:25, August 7, 2005 (UTC)

I'm ahead of you- I changed it to 'stable'. :-) That means it only become visible if nobody has changed it for a period of time, so a series of vandalisations and reverts wouldn't ever appear. WolfKeeper

That's unacceptable. For a start, you would be seeing a version of this page that's years old. That solution doesn't allow constant improvement of pages, which is what wikis are all about. If pages are improved more than once a day, the improvements won't ever show. The wiki should never be "stable". It should grow. Superm401 | Talk 05:52, August 7, 2005 (UTC)

This isn't exactly an ordinary page! And besides, June 5th is not years old. And there's nothing magical about my suggest of using "one day", we could use 6 hours. For this page that would be August 6, and I can't overemphasise how unusual this page is. The wikipedia is *not* a news outlet not up-to-date to within seconds. It's supposed to be accurate. Wikinews is the time critical one.WolfKeeper

Ultimately we have to trade some small measure of timeliness for security. We have to slow down the appearance of edits to the general public so that we can control the accuracy of the information we present. It's not just vandalism, it's well meaning errors, spelling, grammar etc. The wikipedia relies on the editors to do that, and giving them some small time to do their job is very reasonable. And if people are hacking on a supposedly informative encyclopedia entry continuously, it's obviously not ready for the big time yet.WolfKeeper

I just did a quick straw pole through the wikipedia; I was unable to find a vandalisation that had survived for more than 2.5 hours. It's not perfect there doubtless is some that survived, but it's not the normal case. I think a 6 hour stabilisation would work great with >99.9% of all articles whilst massively reducing the effects of vandalisms. WolfKeeper

Proposed Admin option to set page editable only by signed-in accounts

We the editors of the George W. Bush page request that some sort of option (only available to admins) can be set on certain pages that are frequent targets of vandalism. I know a widespread policy of such a nature is not a good idea, but on certain pages, it would cut the amount of work down a tremendous amount, and since it would only be enabled/disabled by admins, its usage would be highly discretionary. --kizzle July 9, 2005 15:57 (UTC)

Are you proposing a semi-protection? There's a failing proposal about just that above. Howabout1 ^{Talk to me!} July 9, 2005 16:12 (UTC)

I personally take offense to the statement "we the editors of George W. Bush", I edit the article at times and have not made up my mind on the issue of semiprotection and I think that Kizzle should only speak for himself and not for the thousands of other users who edit that article. Jtkiefer

My apology... I just haven't seen your name in the vast amount of recent talk. --kizzle 18:50, July 10, 2005 (UTC)

I have been trying to keep away from it as much as possible other than to revert blatant vandalism due the massive number of issues that George W. Bush is perpetually involved in. Jtkiefer 00:42, July 11, 2005 (UTC)

Split the George W. Bush article to diversify the location of content

I suggest that you split the article into various sections. First of all, the article is too long. Look at the stats:

George W. Bush - 54.6KB (7540 words) - 10:15, July 9, 2005

You could make a separate article for every section. That way you would diversify the location of the content, and "vandals" would be less encouraged to make any changes to so many articles. When you have all the content about George W. Bush in one page, "vandals" know that it's easy to disorganize the article. If you had various articles, each for every stage of Bush's life, then the "vandals" would get too lazy to change anything.

To put it differently, if "vandals" know they can disrupt everything by editing one single article, they are gonna do it. Just split the article. On the main article you keep the summary about Bush, and then you make hyperlinks to every section about his life. That way it would also be easier to expand every section. When you have all the thing in one article, it's just more error-prone and vulnerable to "vandals". 2004-12-29T22:45Z July 9, 2005 17:44 (UTC)

To respond to both of you, quite honestly I don't find any convincing arguments against the proposal mentioned before mine to "semi-protect" a frequently vandalized page from anon-ips. In addition, with all due respect, my characterization of the discussion is that the proponents of this concept are bringing forth convincing arguments whereas opposition is mostly absent from the entry. If the only setback to such an action is that it would create more vandals, the type of people who would register an account simply to vandalize already have accounts. In addition, the ability on such a semi-protected page to effectively combat roving IP vandalism seems to greatly out-weigh any minor inconveniences such a proposal would create. By only allowing logged-in users to edit highly vandalized pages, we increase our ability to effectively monitor and control vandalism with little repercussion to the good-intentioned editor. I don't think its fair to simply rely on editors to combat vandalism when the page reaches 30+ vandalisms a day. --kizzle July 9, 2005 18:48 (UTC)

Then say that in that proposal, not here. Howabout1 ^{Talk to me!} July 9, 2005 18:59 (UTC)

You know, then I think you should use both strategies, first of all, forcing users to register, and, secondly, spread the content accross different articles, so it gets more difficult to "vandalize". To those people who say it's not worth the effort to force users to log in, I say that Wikipedia should experiment first, and then we see if it works or not. If it doesn't work, then you reenable users to edit without logging in. Take also a look at #Breakup controversial articles. A user proposed the same thing. To me it makes sense. 2004-12-29T22:45Z 20:23, July 9, 2005 (UTC)

My proposal would mean that anyone could read, but only registered users could edit. I know that would never fly, but protecting heavily vandalized pages so that only registered users could edit them is something I would be very much in favor of. I really do not see what the inconvienence is to anyone by asking them to register. As Wikipedia becomes more better known some change may be inevitable. As far as the comment above that a tiered structure (admin-registered user-anonymous poster)...that I would oppose that though. The dividing line would be registered and unregistered.--MONGO 06:36, July 10, 2005 (UTC)

In addition to this, I'd like to see a one-click option that automatically reports the user and supplies the questionable modification directly to the Admins. I think this would be much more efficient than doing it manually. EreinionFile:RAHSymbol.JPG 05:14, July 11, 2005 (UTC)

So Admins, what happens now considering overwhelming support? --kizzle 00:07, July 13, 2005 (UTC)

Find someone to write the code for you. Simply having admin status does not mean one can. Filing an enhancement bug on Bugzilla wouldn't hurt. -- Cyrius|✎ 05:39, 14 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I don't understand. No offense, but what good is a proposals section if an option with overwhelming support simply gets archived with no action on it? --kizzle 16:39, July 19, 2005 (UTC)

This is a volunteer project. Did you think that by getting support for something, that would force someone to write the code for you? -- Cyrius|✎ 01:02, 20 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Of course not :). Just didn't understand hierarchy of where i needed to direct such a proposal. By the way, there is a current bug now. I would highly suggest people interested in this idea to login to bugzilla and voice your opinion, as we have one person who wants to close it simply due to an across-the-board belief of letting anons edit, and another who does not feel there is concensus, despite a great deal of support above, which is enough at this stage to keep it in limbo. --kizzle 22:43, July 20, 2005 (UTC)

Re: splitting the gwb article to diversify it's content: this has already been done. But this gives me a different idea: use templates to delegate it's contents, and create a level of indirection for vandals. The page could then be protected, but the templates not, such that vandals could only vandalize a section at a time, at best. Kevin Baas^{talk: new} 01:43, July 22, 2005 (UTC)

Animated Battle Maps

I have noticed that it can be hard to tell what is happening when looking at maps of battles, generally a number of pictures of the same map with different arrows drawn on it is used.

I think we should design a flash program that allows battles to be 'replayed' in real time.

The map could be of a single battle like Gettysburg or of a campaign like the eastern front of WW2- It could even be used as an 'empire map' showing the rise and fall of the Roman Empire.

Eventually we could chart the whole of humanity on one huge map showing every nations expansion and contraction.

A good example of something similar to this is Iraq Casualties, which is a map of Iraq which shows the location of every casualty over time and location. Imagine if this was a map of the world and showed every battle fought since 0 BC.

Are you volunteering to write the code? -- Cyrius|✎ 18:46, 14 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

The problem is that Flash has a lot of potential for introducing malicious code. Why not design animated gifs first? - Mgm|^(talk) 12:56, July 15, 2005 (UTC)
Remember to let people edit mercilessly every image and annotation. Should be interesting code. (SEWilco 06:48, 15 July 2005 (UTC))[reply]

Many people do not have Flash. For me a series of maps is clearest.Dejvid 20:43, 28 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Howabout a wiki-editable description language for such events that gets used to generate (for now) a series of PNGs, and (later) animated GIFs or APNGs or Flash animations? (e.g. using map x, place icon y at (lat,long,day,month,year) with arrow to (lat,long,day,month,year) etc...) Ojw 21:25, 5 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Reformat the appearance of the edit page - pretty please

Can we please bring the copyright notice to the top (Ideal example)? Copy and paste dumping is pervasive among anons (easily verifiable if you patrol the new article creation page). The current note is either being ignored or unseen. Despite the bold caps text, the note could be easily unseen by a drop in once or twice editor, who will not bother to scan group of text that the copyright note is buried in. I consider discouraging copyright the most important instruction we can give, so can we please bring it from the bottom to the top? lots of issues | leave me a message 01:25, 25 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I'd say, why bother? there's a pink sign on top of the help desk and still people ask reference desk questions there. I'm pretty sure it won't be read. - Mgm|^(talk) 10:25, August 2, 2005 (UTC)

Medicine collaboration of the fortnight?

I am considering starting a medicine collaboration of the fortnight (of course, it could be a week if there were enough people), and I would like to see if there is any interest in participating in this. As I see it, this would involve both pre-clicinal topics (like anatomy, biochemistry, and so on) and clinical topics (diseases, laboratory tests, surgical procedures, and so on). Lay people would be very welcome—both to express a desire for specific articles to be improved, and to help ensure that the articles aren't too technical (or at least that the broad themes can be easily understood). Of course, no one would be obligated to help. Would anyone be interested? If so, please leave a note here or on my talk page. Thanks! — Knowledge Seeker দ 04:06, July 25, 2005 (UTC)

I've started it up at Wikipedia:WikiProject Clinical medicine/MCOTF (WP:MCOTF). Please come join us. Everyone is welcome. — Knowledge Seeker দ 04:26, July 26, 2005 (UTC)

Status Indicator

About a week ago, I created an indicator system to note whether I am online or not at a given time. Several other users who had been using different systems (or no system at all) have picked up on it and begun using it. In an effort to offer it to a larger audience, I've created Wikipedia:Status. Please take a look and offer thoughts; if you like it, consider giving it a test drive. -- Essjay · Talk 05:55, July 25, 2005 (UTC)

Please reply at Wikipedia talk:Status. r3m0t ^talk 10:28, July 25, 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedia-related collaboration

I noticed that some content in the wikipedia: namespace and quite some self-related content in the article namespace could use some collaboration, and am starting to devellop the idea of a Wikipedia-related collaboration. Are there any people interested? Circeus 17:42, July 25, 2005 (UTC)

Good idea, if enough are interested. See Wikipedia:WikiProject Wikipedia Namespace. I would be willing to help. A related possibility is a "Maintenance" COTW, which could work on the Wikipedia namespace and various backlogs, such as clearing VFDs, categorizing, article cleanup, and RFCs. Maurreen (talk) 16:01, 30 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Great Ideas. CG 05:34, August 2, 2005 (UTC)

OK, I'm starting Wikipedia:Maintenance collaboration. See you there. Maurreen (talk) 04:02, 3 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Please Express Your Objection

There’s someone proposing a policy to close some minor, slow-growing, “hopeless” wikipedias on the wikimedia meta-wiki. (see [1]) This proposal is the enemy to the openness of the whole wikipedia community. I come here to inform you to express your opinion there. I think it's OK to use your own language on on the talk page. Thank you. --Theodoranian19:58, 25 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Page statistics

Is there any way to get hit statistics for a specific page? Like so an author can track how long people stay on a page and what they do when they get there. Website analysis software is very popular and highly useful to all webmasters. Aren't we all webmasters in a way? I think it would be useful to know how my changes affect the flow of traffic between pages for one. I propose that a statistics tab be added to every page right alongside of the other "tabs": discussion, history, watch, etc. Tubelius 09:54, 26 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

There used to be a simple hit-counter for each page (ie how many times it had been accessed) but I think they removed because it was something of a server-hog and didn't really tell anyone anything ("Hmmm.. the most accessed page after Main Page is Penis. Interesting...."). I don't think there is a big chance that it, or indeed anything more advanced, will be put back. There is a page for more "global" statistics like project-size at Wikipedia:Statistics. gkhan 10:41, July 26, 2005 (UTC)

Well a hit counter is coutinuously updated and takes resources with every hit. That is no good. However a page analyzer can be run once a day during slow times. Plus I am talking about data that would be more useful. Tubelius 18:44, 26 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

A dynamic graphical timeline for Wikipedia?

Screenshot of Encarta Dynamic Timeline

I hope this has not been suggested already and if it has, I apologize in advance. Could not find it with a search through the village pump.

I've been using WikiPedia for quite a while now and I have to say that my MSN Encarta installation has been fairly dormant since I found WikiPedia. There is however a couple of things I find really fun and useful with the Encarta implementation. One of these is the Dynamic Timeline feature in Encarta. Take a look at the screenshot above and note the back and forward arrows and the zoom capability in the bottom right hand corner.

I know that implementing something like this would break the html-only / no dynamic content pattern that most of wikipedia seems to adhere to, but I think this would be a high-value-add add-on to wikipedia and people who would like to use it could install a java applet that would display the time line, people who do not want java applets on their machine could just skip using the feature.

I am a java developer with a fair amount of Swing experience and would be interested in contributing to a project like this.

--Mbjarland 11:38, 26 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

This sounds interesting. Are you referring to the one where you can add on events, or the pre-made ones on one subject? — Ilγαηερ (Tαlκ) 11:24, 26 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I'm referring to one where you could add your article to the timeline (including if it's an event or a time period, when it occured, etc) and the timeline could be used as a tool to browse articles. --Mbjarland 13:38, 26 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

There already is a timeline tool for wikipedia. See for instance Alexandria#History. It isn't as pretty but it is certainly useful (although a little under-used, only about 100 on en). It is documented at m:EasyTimeline. gkhan 11:27, July 26, 2005 (UTC)

Did not know about the existing timeline. It does seem fairly extensive and thought through. However, looking at how it works and the fact that it's not dynamic, I think there might still be value for a dynamic timeline feature like the Encarta one. The current timeline implementation seems very useful for displaying a timeline related to a specific subject whereas the dynamic one in Encarta is useful (and a ton of fun) as a starting point for browsing from the toplevel and finding relations between articles (i.e. what where the Europeans doing when the Chinese invented gunpowder), and getting a feel for the orders of magnitude involved in history. Feel free to correct me if you think this is not true...and apologiez for not initially signing my post. --Mbjarland 11:38, 26 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I don't understand what you mean by dynamic, EasyTimeline can be updated dynamically, just look at the wiki-code. But you do have a point in that the encarta one is a lot more easthetically pleasing. I don't see a reason why it wouldn't be possible to create a timeline that shows what the europeans were doing when the chinese were blowing stuff up for the first time, although I don't really see in what article that would belong (History of the World seems a bit broad for one timeline :P). Why don't you try doing some timelines for a few articles, god knows many need it? The markup don't seem that hard :P, especially not for a java programmer (and, by the way, SWT rules!). Ohh, and about not signing, fuhgeddabout it, every one does that sometimes gkhan 12:30, July 26, 2005 (UTC)

Ok, I was probably not being entirely clear in my first post. If you've ever used Google Maps, you could say that the dynamic timeline is to the current wikipedia timelines what Google Maps is to a normal atlas. I.e. the little arrows at the left and right ends of the screenshot allow you to dynamically scroll to the left and right (i.e. further into the past and less far into the past) in the timeline and using the zoom tool in the bottom right corner you can zoom in and out so that from a zoomed out view you would see only major events like say "Persian Wars" or "Jesus Christ" and zooming in more details appear so that you would see things like "Diogenes Founds School of Cynicism" etc. This tool is in Encarta used independent of topics and can be accessed from a global, non-article-dependant menu item. It is a lot of fun to just start by zooming in at say the 16th century and then zoom in and scroll around and get a feel for what was going on. So if this kind of tool existed for wikipedia, you could get a feel for what articles have been written in wikipedia about the 16th century or any other time period and you could correlate the times of separate articles. This does mean that you would have to somehow register your article (is this an event or a time period, when did it occur, what should the label in the timeline be etc) in the timeline and this would naturally require some work, so I wanted to start a discussion here on how hard that would actually be and if people would just be opposed to such a dynamic, non-html paradigm in general. I think the implementation difficulties can be overcome. --Mbjarland 13:12, 26 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Very interesting. I've been wanting to start a similar kind of project, a branching geneology of influences, laid out chronologically, so you could connect wikipedia articles about artists, authors, or thinkers to their influences and followers. Whether or not it has a connecting feature, a dynamic timeline with zoom features would really facilitate browsing specific areas of the Wikipedia. Adding organization like this would improve the value of the content. Is there a simple way to have a visual space with text be open to edits in wiki style? --mlove 8 August 2005

Permanently deleting page versions

People asking questions at the Reference Desk or elsewhere often leave their email addresses for other to contact them. Well-meaning wikipedians then often remove these email addresses, to prevent address harvesters from collecting their addresses for spam. However, does this action do anything? Unlike a regular web page, our archives are freely explorable, and easy for a spider to reach through the links to the history we provide. We think of them as disappearing, but to a machine a previous version of a page is just another web page.

Would there be no way for these email addresses to be abolished? Obviously we can say that it's the poster's own darn fault and leave it at that, but I think that it's important that there ought to be some way to permanently delete information from a page on Wikipedia. Imagine if someone's kid or jealous ex decided to post their credit card details on a page. There would be no way to permanently delete that information without deleting the entire page, which we obviously couldn't do if it were an established article.

I propose that a system be implemented in which an admin be able to permanently expunge a version of a page and replace it with a version without the unwanted information. The page history would simply skip that version, or show that it had existed and was replaced. As much as technically possible, we ought to implement a system such that there should be no way for a spider or harvester to collect email addresses or other vital information — accidentally or maliciously posted — simply by crawling though our pages. — Asbestos | Talk 14:09, 28 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Couldn't we handle this just as well by marking links to history pages or old versions with "nofollow" attributes, so that spiders won't crawl them, but they are still available to humans? DES 15:12, 28 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

This is already done. -- Cyrius|✎ 16:26, 28 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Would this really stop spam-bots? gkhan 07:34, July 29, 2005 (UTC)

At any rate, those "well-meaning wikipedians" should not be removing those email addresses. The person asking the question obviously included their e-mail address so that someone could mail them an answer. Removing the e-mail address makes a private response impossible.

Munging e-mail addresses destroys the usability of the internet, which is supposed to be about communication. If individuals want to mung their e-mail addresses in a attempt to reduce spam, that's one thing, but no one else should "helpfully" do it for them, because it doesn't help, and does hurt. google groups is currently doing this, and it sucks. Steve Summit 14:35, 30 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

The help and reference desks clearly ask people NOT to leave their email adress and return here for an answer. If they can't be bothered to check in for an answer, why should we bother protecting them or even answering for that matter? - Mgm|^(talk) 10:38, August 2, 2005 (UTC)

True, people probably shouldn't delete addresses. However, it is no harm to de-spammify them -- i.e. changing john.doe@isp.com into john DOT doe AT isp DOT com. I will often do that. [[smoddy]] 10:44, 2 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Admins can selectively delete revisions from a page. It's just a very tedious process (especially on pages with massive histories), and will tend not to be done unless there's an extremely good reason for it. Cyrius 16:26, 28 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

The same problem came up on Harry Potter recently, when someone posted a copy of the book. It was quickly reverted. However, the page had 3000 edits, so it would have taken the admin one heck of a long time to do it. Therefore a request was made for a developer to do it, as they can run a very simple SQL query. So the short answer to the original question is no, but others can. Whether they will is a different matter. Cheers, [[smoddy]] 16:40, 28 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Ok, cool. I'm glad that there's a system in place, though it doesn't sound like a particularly easy or efficient system. It seems a pity that it's so difficult to do, as that basically prevents admins from easily removing people's adresses, which I think would be important if there were an easy system in place, but I guess it can be used for the more important stuff.

As for DES's question, nofollow attributes don't have any legal bindings. Search engines agree to abide by them, partly because it helps prevent rank influencing through linkspam, but there's nothing preventing a spam-bot from following any link it can see. — Asbestos | Talk 12:48, 29 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Fair use image validation

There are large numbers of images tagged as being "fair use" on Wikipedia. These range from the eminently reasonable (there would be no other way to get an equivilent image; an example would be Image:1966 final bobby moore.jpg) to the completely unreasonable (another image could easily be gained; this is particularly true of cars—an example would be Image:2000 Dodge Intrepid.jpg). These invalid "fair use" images damage Wikipedia's reputation (imagine the librarians when they discovered that we were using these images: what an example to set to the children!), and they also lay us open to suits for copyright infringement. I feel this is an unacceptable state of affairs. I am therefore proposing setting up Wikipedia:Fair use validation, as a process to validate fair use claims before sending them to WP:IfD. IfD doesn't really allow proper discussion, as it is a very cloistered and busy page. A proper fair use forum would allow us to clarify fair use claims, improve the copyright status of the encyclopedia and Wikipedia's reputation in all. Do people think this is a good idea? Are you with me? Cheers, [[smoddy]] 20:25, 28 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I have been pointed on IRC to Wikipedia:Requested copyright examinations. However, I don't feel this addresses the same issue. That was just a vague attempt at examining copyrights. I guess what I am proposing is a large-scale attempt to verify (and cut down) the use of fair-use on Wikipedia. Perhaps this would be impractical. Suggestions welcome... [[smoddy]] 21:37, 28 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

You could set it up as being similar to Wikipedia:Image sleuthing — create a page with ten or so images always up for discussion. For each image, the outcome of the discussion could result in its being tagged {{Verifieduse}} or being sent to WP:IfD. But what's your scope? Are you hoping to go through every fairuse picture here and check them? Or would only images under contention be brought to Wikipedia:Fair use validation for discussion? — Asbestos | Talk 12:56, 29 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

The process is basically what I was suggesting. Depending on the amount of people involved in the project, I can envisage it being a place where fair-use claims are suggested as being bogus, then the uploader being invited to comment. As to the scope, I guess I was suggesting is a project to verify possibly bogus claims of fair-use. I'm sure that you recognise the tendency for fairuse claims to really mean "this image is copyrighted and I want to use it". I am suggesting going through Category:Fair use images, and finding images that particular users don't think are valid. I am basically suggesting this here in the hope that I will get support, or people thinking the project is wholly unviable. Which do you think? [[smoddy]] 13:09, 29 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Personally I think the idea is fine, and I'd be glad to help. I'd like to know a little bit more about the history of proposals like this in the past, though. At Wikipedia:Fair_use#Tagging_files, it mentions "For a while there was a proposed discussion system for fair use images. While it was little used...". Not knowing the history of that system, it would be good to know what happened to it, and why it had such little support. Either way, though, I'd be happy to help start it up again if there are no reasons against it. — Asbestos | Talk 13:17, 29 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Nutrition information template

I'd like to propose a nutrition information template (infobox) for the various food articles. It should be possible using CSS to build a template that looks a lot like the nutrition information provided on the sizes of boxes, rather than scanning in the image. Anybody interested? Thanks! — RJH 21:54, 28 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Cease-fire on eras

I've suggested a cease-fire on eras, at the Village pump. Maurreen (talk) 09:39, 29 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

GPS-Tagged Wiki articles

Would it be possible to add extra metadata to a wiki article that contains GPS coordinates? This way, if you happened upon an area of interest with your Wikipedia-linked cell phone, it might discover an interesting tidbit of information that geographically hot. For instance, you might be wandering around the shores of Thermopylae in Greece and get a history lesson, or you might be driving along I-90 near Mitchell, South Dakota, and receive a download about the Corn Palace. I think it would be neat and not terribly difficult, but of course I'd like to propose this to the gods of Wikipedia.

There are already a lot of articles that contain geographical coordinates, often using a standardized template. See Wikipedia:WikiProject Geographical coordinates. For example, if you click on the coordinates in the infobox at Boston, you are directed to a number of map sites. So the possibility to add metadata is there. How to let that data interact with your GPS device, I don't know. Eugene van der Pijll 18:22, 31 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Very cool -- I didn't see GPS coordinates on other articles so I wasn't sure. We might also need to add an extra metadata element, "planetary body", since invariably over time articles on Mars, the moon, etc. will need coordinates on those systems as well.

Installed great; Can't Post

I installed MediaWiki. It set up fine. I adjusted the pages and modified one graphic, following instructions. I can manipulate the main page and some of the help pages, and I've added categories, but I can't get it to add stories. Every time I do a search, instead of offering to allow me to add something on the subject, it says "trying full text search" and won't offer a link to establish a new subject.

What is going wrong?

This is not the right place to post ("proposals"?) - but the answer is at m:MediaWiki_FAQ#How_do_I_show_a_link_to_create_a_page_when_searches_fail.3F r3m0t ^talk 23:00, July 31, 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Featured sounds ?

What with featured articles and featured pictures, I think it may be approaching time to establish a process for featured sounds. This would be for recorded music as well as for "sound portrait"-type illustrations of articles: birdsong, the shouts of a crowded marketplace, a running steam engine. I think Spoken Wikipedia articles, though, as they are basically text-based, wouldn't be appropriate for this (though of course they would be improved by the inclusion of these sounds). I realize that there aren't many sounds on Wikipedia as of yet, but I think that establishing a featuring process will encourage more exceptional recordings to be collected by Wikipedians. What do you all think?--Pharos 23:16, 31 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I think this is an excellent idea. There a quite a few good sound recordings already, perhaps more than most of us realise. I think that by allowing sounds to be elevated to featured status more contributors migt be encouraged to supply them. However, I think ther will have to be strict guidelines from the outset about what might constitute a featured sound: after all, a featured article requires a lot of work. --Gareth Hughes 10:12, 1 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I think a very good idea over-all. I think the requirements should be much like the Featured Pictures: that is, be both highly informative within the context of the article, and be aesthetically and technically pleasing. — Asbestos | Talk 16:03, 1 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I've experimentally created Wikipedia:Featured sound candidates and copied this discussion to Wikipedia talk:Featured sound candidates. Let's continue the discussion there.--Pharos 03:59, 11 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Template:Test wording

A couple months ago a user noted that most vandals don't necessary add junk, they delete and change information as well, and so the template ought to read that their edits have been "reverted" not "removed". I agreed, and have made several prompting comments in the talk page ever since to see if anyone else cares or has an opinion, but since the template is protected I can't be bold and change anything myself. No one has yet voiced any opinions. Should the change be made, or are there reasons against? — Asbestos | Talk 16:03, 1 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia:Deletion reform

Ed's rash actions today got me to thinking about the different proposals to reform the Deletion process. So I have created a page to discuss these proposals and try and extract some implementable policy from them. Wikipedia:Deletion reform. Note the "please edit" note. Thanks! humblefool ®^{Deletion Reform} 20:51, 1 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Elaborate on "Ed's rash actions" please. --Golbez 21:01, August 1, 2005 (UTC)

It refers to him deleting VfD. -- Joolz 21:19, 1 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

That is quite rash, and I hope that he was immediately de-admin'd. —Mike 16:32, August 2, 2005 (UTC)

He wasn't, because most of us agree with him. --Golbez 17:19, August 2, 2005 (UTC)

Agreeing that VfD is broken is a far different thing from agreeing that pulling the rug out from under everyone was a good thing. -- Cyrius|✎ 21:33, 2 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

It was a lot effective than that Speedy proposal. --Golbez 21:36, August 2, 2005 (UTC)

For more on this issue see:

An RFC about the deletion of the VfD page (since undeleted): Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Deletion of VFD.
A vote on the deletion of the VfD page: Wikipedia:Requests for deletion.

Paul August ☎ 15:01, August 3, 2005 (UTC)

Beakman & Jax files on Wikipedia

I am the creator of You Can with Beakman & Jax, an educational comic strip that's in about 250 newspapers. The CBS TV show Beakman's World was created from the comic in the early 90s. A company called bonus.com has offered file serving (and a salary) to me for the comic's archives. They are no longer able to do this and I lose file serving on August 31, 2005.

I'm looking to get the files served elsewhere, like here maybe. I know there is no salary here, but I'd still like the files offered to teachers and students without me needing to pay for file serving. Or, if you have other thoughts, please be in touch.

If anyone want to discuss this with me the best thing is to contact e by eMail at myQuestion@beakman.com. You can look through the files at http://bonus.com. Then click the Strategy button.

best,

Jok Church

I'm not sure, but perhaps you should be looking at Wikisource? In any case, it definitely seems like something to preserve for the future. --NeuronExMachina 06:56, 4 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I used to read those! :-)

You probably want to ask in their version of the village pump: Wikisource:Scriptorium - Omegatron 02:02, August 6, 2005 (UTC)

I used to read those too! lots of issues | leave me a message 22:43, 7 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Making Search Engine non-case-sensitive

I see a lot of redirections of articles merely because the search engine is case-sensitive. Would it not be better to make the search engine non-case-sensitive, just like Yahoo and Googles, so that these redirections can be avoided?

Also, it would be good if the search engine can propose the closest alternative keywords, should there be a typo error or if the user does not know the correct spelling. Isn't this what other search engines are doing? PM Poon 14:56, 2 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Maps

Map of pangasinan

http://www.pangasinan.gov.ph/theprovince/towncity.htm

http://www.pangasinan.gov.ph/theprovince/map.htm

http://www.pangasinan.org/surfmap.htm

I hope wikipedia could make a detailed political map of pangasinan with its towns and cities.

"WikiMaps" A new kind of wiki ?

Moved to Wikipedia:Village pump (perennial proposals)

The new masthead

Or whatever it's called - "From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit". Possible I missed it before but it seems new. Is there an ongoing discussion of this somewhere? I think it's too wordy, should go back to just "From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia". Tualha (Talk) 00:37, 3 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Whose stupid idea was this? It looks ridiculous. BLANKFAZE | (что??) 00:58, 3 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]
- Grr. It's at MediaWiki:Tagline. I reverted this. Things like this that affect sitewide appearance should be discussed. BLANKFAZE | (что??) 01:05, 3 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  - "Tagline"...yeah, that's a good word. Thanks. Tualha (Talk) 01:17, 3 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Neutral Wikipedia?

Dear all

I am writting about the issue of Macedonia, Republic of Macedonia, Macedonian Slavs (like Wikipedia calls the Macedonians) and the problem between Macedonia and Greece about the term Macedonia. Rant snipped

Stop spamming this everywhere. -- Cyrius|✎ 21:26, 3 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Snipping duplication is fine, but if someone knows where the actual content is, could you please link? -- Jmabel | Talk 06:26, August 4, 2005 (UTC)

Here is a link to the whole text of my complaint: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28policy%29#Neutral_Wikipedia.3F

Bias is here.....

If this Wikipedia wants to remain a living, growing, and ever improving project.... I suspect it will have no choice but to admit its POV, and to place a very clear disclaimer as to the difficulty it has with maintaining accurate information. For whatever reason, this wiki is having some troubles, maybe for its extraordinary growth rate, thus a bit like a clumsy and oafish teenager... or maybe because it has attracted so many people from Public Relations, Media, and even the intelligence community, NOT because it is such a reliable source for information, but rather unfortunately, because of its powerful dynamic to mold Knowledge, Opinion, and for what people falsely carry away as "Fact".

Place a disclaimer Mr Wales, front page and center. Tell people what exactly an open-source wiki is, and remind them in much stronger words that anyone, ANYONE can come here to add knowledge, just as easily as they can bend it.... the honorable future of Wikpedia may depend on this. 3chester4 14:26, 3 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Given that this is your only edit, I'm wondering just what experience you've had that lead you to post this little rant. -- Cyrius|✎ 01:54, 4 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I wonder after editing so much how you can dismiss his claims as a "rant". This site is swarmed by POV warriors. And there are some areas such as college pages where promotional POV is standard. lots of issues | leave me a message 10:07, 4 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

It's extremely easy, actually, to dismissed unsourced ramblings as rants. If he has a problem, he can cite a specific instance - otherwise he's just screaming at the tide. He doesn't even tell us what he thinks "Wikipedia's POV" is. --Golbez 03:09, August 5, 2005 (UTC)

It's a very, very common "rant" to just dismiss offhand. See Wikipedia:Village_pump_(policy)#Wikipedia_disclaimer and Wikipedia:Proposed update of MediaWiki:Tagline for current discussion. - Omegatron 02:00, August 6, 2005 (UTC)

Template:talkheader

I created Template:talkheader as something that could go on the top of every Talk page (a) to welcome newbies on any page they land on and (b) to remind regulars of key points whenever they visit a talk page. It'll only really work with a software change to make it automatically appear on every talk page, but for now it can be tested and developed, and we can see what people think. Rd232 19:57, 3 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I think MediaWiki:Talkpagetext may show up on all talk pages automatically. Perhaps someone more informed could confirm or deny? Superm401 | Talk 05:42, August 5, 2005 (UTC)

incorporating music into wikipedia

this may have been brought up before but I didn't see anything about it when I read the other topics.

I'd like it if Wikipedia would incorporate music files into some entries. For example a classical muscian should also have music files in their entries just as they have picture files. On this subject we really need to break free from the conventional conception of what an encyclopedia should be.

Music is quite welcome. The problem is finding music which has acceptable copyright terms. -- Cyrius|✎ 02:00, 4 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Resources for Research

I propose that Wikipedia purchase site licenses for services like ProQuest Historical Newspapers and LexisNexis. These are just select examples of research services that could be helpful to Wikipedia editors. If the site licenses were purchased, Wikipedia editors would be able to get interesting new forms of information, such as case law and back newspapers. I already see editors asking each other to use university and work accounts for these services. It would be better, however, if Wikipedia had its own license. This would be invaluable in our constant effort to cite our sources as well as in doing more deep research. Superm401 | Talk 04:45, August 4, 2005 (UTC)

Proquest may be affordable but LexisNexis licenses for the inner core of contributors would be staggering. I agree that access to these databases would wonderfully lift the quality of content. We just need to find a way to obtain it for free or low cost... lots of issues | leave me a message 12:09, 4 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Do you think I should write and ask how much the ProQuest costs? I won't if there's no interest. Superm401 | Talk 16:33, August 4, 2005 (UTC)

I can't imagine they'd agree; it's hard to see how it would mean anything else than effectively making it free to anybody who signed up to Wikipedia. They might never sell another subscription. Rd232 16:39, 4 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

That's not quite a reasonable way of looking at it. Plenty of libraries already have these services free. Yet, people don't just use the libraries' accounts forever. They sign up themselves if they have a substantial need. No one is going to be depending on Wikipedia's account for important business. Most people who use these services will never even hear that we have an account. ProQuest would undoubtedly specify that the account is valid only for Wikipedia research, just as they specify that other accounts are valid for only corporate business. The corporations and non-profit organizations that sign up for these research services are not going to be willing to misuse our account for their purposes. It's too much of a legal risk. I highly doubt Proquest will pass this up if we can afford it. Superm401 | Talk 16:49, August 4, 2005 (UTC)

I would support begging rather than asking for a quote. The licenses can be limited to only members who've had a dedicated history of article writing. lots of issues | leave me a message 19:11, 4 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Okay, I guess that's a fair start. If they refuse to donate their service, we can decide where to go from there. Ron Clowney of Proquest seems to be an appropriate contact for this. His information is here. I won't post it on Wikipedia for obvious reasons. I believe our best choice would be to send him a fax. What do you think? Superm401 | Talk 05:18, August 5, 2005 (UTC)

Does anyone have a problem with me sending a fax as a representative of the Wikimedia foundation? Superm401 | Talk 06:16, August 6, 2005 (UTC)

Go for it dude. And thanks, we would benefit so much if you succeed. lots of issues | leave me a message 19:06, 6 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Help categories

I'm thinking that our stub categories could be complemented by "Help" categories. That is, we could have something like "Foo articles that need help" or "... need special help", if they need cleanup or wikification or are disputed, etc.

That way these articles (and possibly categories) might be more likely to get the attention of people who care more and know more about the given subject.

The discussion is at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Categories. Maurreen (talk) 08:18, 4 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

WikiWho - THE virtual who's who for common folk

Not certain if this has been proposed. I did a lite search and didn't find anything. But I was thinking of a 'phone book' of the world - for us common folk. There could be a common template to ad photos. Perhaps 3 image slots for different ages like 'baby', 'young adult', and 'mature adult', or something along those lines. There could be fields to supply as much or as little information as possible. Nothing personal such as SSN and street address or any of that nature. Since the whole world would be participating information gathered would have to be linear, in that it's applicable to everyone and each could relate to. Such as

Where born: Year born: Maiden name: Sir name: Syblings

It could turn out to be a short bio that is updated or deleted at will. How to prevent same name entries and the like, I haven't really thought of yet. Just thinking out loud right now.

Just thinking out loud. If anyone from Wikipedia would like to pick this thought up, I would be happy to help in any way.

info at jamescalvin dot com

Template:VPP-project r3m0t ^talk 07:12, August 5, 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedia has a newspaper so why not a....

...podcast! Wouldn't it be great with a weekly show that discussed what has been going on in wikipedia for the last week? "Well, the arbcom is up for relection, any surprises this year Willmcv?" "Yes, it turns out that recently admined and bureocrated gkhan is running. And he is looking good! Also in the race, DrZoidberg!"

All jokes aside, wouldn't it be a nice wikiproject? We certainly have people able to do it (see WP:SPOKEN). Sortof like the Signpost but spoken! A good way to keep up with all the things going on. And with the wonder of Skype there could be interviews with a number of interesting wikipedians. (ohh, and by the way, I picked Willmcw because he is active in WP:SPOKEN, no other reason :P) gkhan 08:19, August 5, 2005 (UTC)

personally, I find this quite unattractive. Of course that's no argument against it, but I would very much that this is only regarded as a possibility provided we have server space, bandwith and cpu power to spare, and then some. I don't want to experience lags because too many people are watching wiki-tv! dab (ᛏ) 10:13, 5 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Bandwith isn't really an issue I think, there are sites offering unlimited bandwith for very little money. And besides, it could be hosted using bittorrent which would pretty much eliminate any bandwith-concerns. gkhan 10:31, August 5, 2005 (UTC)

sure, it could be hosted offsite. The 'unlimited bandwith' deals are not really unlimited, as there is only so much data you can squeeze through their cables in a month, and WP almost certainly needs much more. The Alexa stats are beginning to look positively scary... Anyway, I suppose there is nothing to stop wikipedians from starting an audio service somewhere. dab (ᛏ) 10:49, 5 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Bandwidth can be reduced with technologies such as BitTorrent, perhaps using an RSS feed to announce current files. Is there an implementation of BitTorrent which supports automatic updates/inclusion of new files? (SEWilco 13:54, 6 August 2005 (UTC))[reply]

RSS feed?

Is there any way to get an RSS feed set up for Wikipedia featured articles? Or articles as they're featured on the main page? (Cross-posted at "technical".) – Quadell ^{(talk) (sleuth)} 19:42, August 5, 2005 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Syndication. Bovlb 04:28:48, 2005-08-06 (UTC)

Is there a plan to change editing / review approach?

Reuters, as quoted by Yahoo!, reports Wikipedia will impose stricter editorial rules to prevent vandalism of its content, quoting Jimmy Wales. Slashdot picked this story up. Later text seems to suggest this is really a separation of "stable" and "draft" versions. Does this mean there's a plan to implement an article validation proposal, and if so, what's been decided? If it's just continuing to be discussed, could someone say so? If not, could someone say that too? The article makes it sound like there's new news, but that doesn't make it so...! Sorry for asking a "question" in Village pump, but it seemed like a major proposal issue if there IS such a change and worth discussing. Dwheeler 01:21, August 6, 2005 (UTC)

I think this is referring to Wikipedia 1.0. There are no plans to freeze any pages on the web version of Wikipedia, except temporarily. Superm401 | Talk 01:23, August 6, 2005 (UTC)

There has been no announcement by Jimbo or the board, and no verification of any such thing from Wikimania attendees. It is generally accepted that the Reuters report is rather short on facts. -- Cyrius|✎ 01:33, 6 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I hope so because this would be a really bad idea. What articles exactly could ever be "finished"? Certainly none of the major ones. Osomec 06:01, 6 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

There are article validation possibilities being discussed, Eloquence gave part of a presentation on one possible method of doing this this morning, as part of a peer review process I think, although I must confess to not being awake enough to take most of it in. Only an abstract of the presentation has been published so far, but more should be added.

Certainly as far as I understand it, all these things are still proposed and no decisions have been made. Thryduulf 14:13, 6 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Templated Database

I've observed several situations in which access to pieces of information would be helpful. A shared database could be accessed through a modification to Template behavior which would allow manipulation of retrieved data.

Using {{Data:Country/USA}} within a template may convert to Article=United States|President=George W. Bush|Continent=North America

Several possible uses are suggested:

WikiProject Fact and Reference Check: list of references that people are using
WikiProject Wikicite and meta:Wikicite: shared database of citations
meta:Footnotes: detailed citation information
Infobox: contain information in common between articles
Country referencing templates: linked flags and country articles.

Perhaps this can be provided primarily through the existing Template code.

Data could be stored in "database" entries, perhaps within a "Data:" namespace.
A single Data: entry could contain several values, such as Title, Author, Mass, Dimensions.
Existing template code supports named parameters.
Template modification needed: Templates could use data if substitution of values took place when accessing a "database" entry.
Desirable modification: Template references to nonexistent data entries reduce to nothing.
Existing template code could then display data as needed. Interface to Data needed.
Access to Data: namespace through browsers could display an edit field for each value within a single page, or use existing dictionary WikiSyntax.
- Existing [[namespace:article/article#section]] syntax can refer to data entry as well as specific item within (ie: current head of state for specific country: {{Data:Country/England#Head_of_state}}.

(SEWilco 13:50, 6 August 2005 (UTC))[reply]

I'm not certain if this is the same thing, but one of the ideas for the future presented by Eloquence at Wikimania this morning was the possibilities of inter-language namespaces, e.g. for countries (Country:Germany) and companies (Company:Google) that will host shared infoboxes. The reasoning being that the capital of a country doens't change because of the language it is in, and the turnover of a company is the same in Finnish as it is in Esperanto, and that when information does change (e.g. the president or CEO, then only one change is needed to update all the Wikipedias.

When and if this comes about is not certain, as they are all just ideas (not even proposals) at this stage. Thryduulf 14:22, 6 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

This proposal was created independently of what you describe at Wikimania, but is intended for the same type of shared-data usage. However, language sensitivies can exist. The country "United States" does not have the same name worldwide due to translations of the component words. Possible solutions include separate language spaces (same as each lang has its own Image: space), shared global space (same as Commons behavior), or lang: tags within pages for alternatives to a default value. (SEWilco 16:06, 6 August 2005 (UTC))[reply]

This technology would also replace arrays with a template for each element, which store data as templates. (SEWilco 01:35, 8 August 2005 (UTC))[reply]

Software recognition of dates in plain text

A discussion started about automating date preferences. I think it is worthy of further discussion.

Here is the original text:

It is impossible to automatically format a date without creating link. This contributes a lot to overlinking.

For example, there are pages with 1000 links to the year 2000. I think that is overlinked. As a category, dates are the most excessively linked articles, as is shown by their ranking on the following lists:

Is it possible to have a 'create date object' that is independent of the 'hyperlink to other article' method? Bobblewik (talk) 16:33, 30 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

The obvious syntax to use for this would be the double underscore, i.e. __30 May__ __2005__ would be equivalent to [[30 May]] [[2005]]. The first occurence of each date, particularly the year, could be linked but the others formated but not linked. I have seen other proposals for this, and I support it. Thryduulf 22:23, 30 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Interesting. I can see why special characters are needed at the beginning and end of the date object i.e. before '30' and after '2005'. Is there a particular reason why special characters need to be placed in the middle of the date object i.e. between 'May' and '2005'? Bobblewik (talk) 13:26, 31 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

hmm, the current format has characters in the middle, [[30 May]] [[2005]], but there is a reason for this - we have articles on every year, and on every day of a year, but not on every day of every year (very sensible, as apparently nothing of note happened on 14 October between 1987 and 1998) and thus it needs to be two links.

I suppose that it would be possible for the software recognise a date in any standard formats (see below) without internal characters. For simplicity though I think it would be preferable to allow both __30 May 2005__ and __30 May__ __2005__.

30 May 2005
30 May, 2005
May 30 2005
May 30, 2005
2005-05-30
30-05-2005
05-30-2005
30 May
May 30

Thryduulf 15:19, 31 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I did not know that the middle characters were deliberately put there to make two links rather than one. I thought they were an unintended feature. I would personally find it simpler to avoid middle characters when formatting only. If you think it is simpler to allow both, then that is fine by me.

It sounds good. Is it really possible?

As for the middle characters, I think both should be allowed as inevitably people will try to format it as if it were a link, but I agree that without is nicer in the code. If we allow either, neither method will break and users can use whichever is the more intuitive for them.

Is it possible? I think we should try and get a bit more input into its desirability (there are several discussions on dates happening in several places at once, and when I next have time, I propose to bring them all into one) and then make a feature request on bugzilla. I don't have time to do that at the moment. Thryduulf 18:29, 31 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

As to two links being required for date preference, that is simply not correct. If the ISO 8601 format is used, a date such as 2005-03-05 can be linked as 2005-03-05 and will show up with proper preference formatting. I have taken to using this format when I intend a date to be linked for prefernce settins, particularly for dates of birth/death in a biographical article. The seperate links mzy be winted as links but since the proposal is for a way to apply date preference settings without making links, that is irrelavent. I think that ideally such a new construct should allow any of a range of formats (although i think the all-numeric formats should follow ISO 8601). I don't see any advantage in allowing (much less engouraging) two-part constructs. Since this will be a a new constturct, that no one will use without learning new rules in any case the rules don't have to folow the rules for the previous style of date linking, particualrly since those rules are rathey controary to the ways dates are written in other contexts.DES 22:07, 31 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I support this proposal. I agree that linking to dates is a generally cause of over-linkink. i think thjat shuch links, as links, are usually pointless, and should be removed if there were to be another way to apply date preference formmatting. I also think that most links to partial dates (D/month without year, or year alone) are already pointles, and i have started to remove them when I edit articles that have such links, although i don't go looking for them.

I have no idea if the proposal is technically hard or easy. I find it hard to belive that it is impossible. Note that instead of _10 Jan 2005_ we could have #Date(10 Jan 2005) if that were technically easier to implent. DES 22:07, 31 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

There's no need for special syntax, the software can recognise dates in plain text. -- Tim Starling 09:35, Jun 1, 2005 (UTC)

That would be much simpler if implemented! I presume that on occasions (such as this) where we want to see a specific format not altered by preference then putting the date in nowiki tags would allow that? (i.e. 01 June 2005 would appear as per your preference and <nowiki>01 June 2005</nowiki> would always appear that way). Thryduulf 12:50, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Excellent. So where does this go now? Bobblewik (talk) 23:13, 7 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Does anybody know how to implement this? Bobblewik 13:38, 6 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I think the first step will be to put a feature request on bugzilla. Outside of that, I'll point any of the developers at the discussion if I happen to see them later. Thryduulf 09:54, 7 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I wonder why a new element type is introduced here. Why can we not use a template for this (vaguely similar to the style already in use for geographic coordinates):

{{date |any date having month in text or following ISO}}

{{date dmy|numeric date with day first}}

{{date mdy|numeric date with month first}}

The first form like {{date | 30 May, 2005}} would accept any of "30 May 2005", "30 May, 2005", "May 30 2005", "May 30, 2005", "2005-05-30", "30 May", "May 30", "2005"
The second and third would accept "30-05-2005" and "05-30-2005" respectively.
−Woodstone 10:50, August 7, 2005 (UTC)

Templates can't do that. -- Cyrius|✎ 19:21, 7 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the responses. I don't know how to put a feature request on bugzilla. I would be grateful if somebody more familiar with it could do it. Bobblewik 21:56, 7 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Trimming the fat from the welcome template

The {{welcome}} template is the very first thing many users see. Unfortunately, recently it has been growing out of proportions, as some people think that answers to any possible question a newbie might have must be covered in the template. This has lead to a huge welcome page, a screenful on my computer, and it happened at least several times that new users just deleted or moved the welcome template I put on their talk page.

I suggest removing some of the links from there, which are covered in the help pages anyway, and just make a prominent link to the help page. Also, I believe is an overkill to tell the newbies about the Wikipedia:Topical index (who the heck reads that one).

My trimmed version of the welcome template is available at Template:Welcome/Proposed version 1. Again, it is the original with some links cut out. I wonder what people think. Oleg Alexandrov 20:08, 6 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

George W. Bush photos add nothing to articles on state leaders

every president meets with other leaders. state leaders like to meet with other state leaders. Adding a picture of George W. Bush and the said state leader in any of these articles is unnecessary and excessive and it adds NOTHING to the article.

just test it. go to an article on a president of another country, and most of the times, there will be some photo of George W. Bush that shouldn't be there. Unless George W. Bush has some personal or political connections to this person, like Tony Blair, adding a photo of him is just stupid.

When you're looking for free images one of the best sources is the United States federal government. US federal government images of current state leaders tend to have the current US president alongside. -- Cyrius|✎ 19:19, 7 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

It is not mandatory that an entire image be used. If a single person's image is desired then only that part of the image could be uploaded. (SEWilco 01:25, 8 August 2005 (UTC))[reply]

locking pictures in articles

Is there a way to lock a picture to one article to prevent a valid image in one context being used to vandalise other articles? Two examples: One anonymous user keeps using the valid image of a penis, which is on the Penis page, to vandalise scores of user pages. Another keeps using images of Darth Vader and other Star Wars images to vandalise the page on Pope Benedict XVI. Locking the pages isn't an option. The vandal may disappear for two weeks, then suddenly reappear and begin inserting the images over and over again until they are blocked, at which time they reappear using another IP, then another to keep doing it.

Some of the images that they were using but which weren't in any real article were deleted immediately but users don't want to have to propose the deletion of valid pictures. But it is gone beyond a joke at this stage; I once had to delete the penis picture of 20 user pages in 10 minutes once, then delete Darth Vader three times off the pope's page. I blocked the vandal only to find that he had come back and put the penis picture on another batch of user pages again. Locking a picture into one page with a valid article so that it could not be used elsewhere (and there is not likely to be much need throughout Wikipedia for a picture of a penis or a picture of a minor Star Wars character off their own article) would solve the problem.

FearÉIREANN\^(caint) 19:31, 7 August 2005 (UTC) [reply]

Now, I'm not a fan, but... Darth Vader is a minor Star Wars character? :-)

Aside from that, no, we don't have such a feature, nor is there any way of implementing it with what we've got. There is a feature that will prevent certain images from displaying in-line, but that's not what you want here.

Mediazilla awaits. The only problem will be maintenance; ideally you'd want something that allows you to whitelist pages for certain images (and implicitly blacklist everything else). You can also stick to one page, if you reckon there will never be a useful image for vandalizing that's legitimately used on multiple pages. JRM · Talk 23:03, 7 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

The feature to prevent an image from appearing inline is mentioned in this post. I realise that isn't quite what you wanted, but it should be possible to program a similar feature which blocks a named image from appearing other than on one or more named pages.-gadfium 01:47, 8 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Actor Filmographies

Looking for comments on a new way to present filmographies in actor articles for improved consistency, less IMDb thievery, etc. I put together a test in my userspace and I'm looking for opinions before rolling it into any articles. Thanks! RADICALBENDER ★ 21:02, August 7, 2005 (UTC)

I think it is far too large and complicated, simple is always better. I prefer the regular list because it is less distracting and takes up less space, however I do like what is done in Henry Fonda filmography, but I would only use the Henry Fonda list style if the list of films was a seperate article. MechBrowman 02:58, August 9, 2005 (UTC)

Trollworld - A parallel Wikipedia universe

I propose after identifying any chronic vandal, we should turn a switch, and that user will be cookied into a parallel version of Wikipedia almost indistinguishable from the real Wikipedia. There will be no indication of banishment for the user. He can vandalize to his content, unresponded to, so that he can admire his "victory". The theory goes that trolls need an audience that interacts with their behavior. Remove all response and this troll will become dejected and forget the hobby. It's also a very funny joke for us to play on vile brats.

To make this simple, the front page, current events, etc. will disappear. The landing page of Trollworld will be a Google like simple search page. The header will announce the new rebranded sleek Wikipedia. I don't expect the typical malicious vandal, a 15 year old pothead, to catch on. lots of issues | leave me a message 01:23, 8 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Hilarious idea. -- Cyrius|✎ 01:54, 8 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Love it. Trollworld 2.0 would incorporate RC-patrol 'bots, which would randomly revert edits and drop

Hello, I'm [[User:{{subst:REVISIONUSER}}|{{subst:REVISIONUSER}}]]. An edit that you recently made seemed to be a test and has been reverted. If you want to practice editing, please use the sandbox. If you think I made a mistake, or if you have any questions, you can leave me a message on [[User talk:{{subst:REVISIONUSER}}|my talk page]]. Thanks! templates on the troll's talk pages. FreplySpang (talk) 02:01, August 8, 2005 (UTC)

Shhhh! Don't let them catch on! :-) Hilarious idea, and unfortunately probably not possible. - Omegatron 02:05, August 8, 2005 (UTC)

DO IT! DO IT! DO IT! ~~ N (t/c) 06:08, 8 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Let's archive this into perennial proposals - as the last one on the page. :) r3m0t ^talk 06:59, August 8, 2005 (UTC)

Hey, that's cheating! :-) JRM · Talk 08:09, 8 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Let's finally SOLVE the Macedonia issue...

Please visit the following link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Macedonia#Let.27s_finally_SOLVE_this_issue...

I sterbinski 13:14, 8 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

A new Word Game

I don't know where to look for someone or a company who would be interested in a word game that I'm developing that is fun for adults and could also be used as a good tool for teaching and promoting kids on how to form the basics of sentences and using wrods in the proper context. Does any one know what would be the best way to present this to a board game manufacturer for consideration? Frank Eggleston

Are you proposing that WIkipedia be involved in this somehow? If not, I suggest you ask your question at the Reference Desk, where you'll get more response. Cheers, Bovlb 16:21:56, 2005-08-08 (UTC)

Prevent users from being blocked along with their IPs

Just now I found I was blocked from editing. Gah. The first time it happened I had to sit it out, but this time around I have my amazing wiki-moulding powers so was able to unblock myself, largely for the point of making this post.

Many users, unfortunately including myself, are stuck with crappy ISPs, but the average user isn't going to want to sit through three-hour phone conversations with clueless 20-something brunettes finally ending with some sort of "three months free access" cop-out, rather than an expensive hardware upgrade. So maybe WE should do something.

I think there needs to be some sort of logged-in protection. So if you're a logged-in user you are OK, even if your logged-out IP just got blocked.

Alternately, if that allows people to log out and vandalise then log in and continue editing innocently, maybe have it for admins only since they're so "trustworthy".

Or something. Anyway, see what you think. Feel free to add fertiliser or weedkiller to this sprouting idea. :) Garrett^Talk 13:23, 8 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

gkhan picks up a spraycan and starts spraying it all over Garret. He is promtly blocked.

Yes, this is a pickle isn't it. I don't like your idea because, as you say, it's painfully easy to circumvent it. I think that when this happends, a user should send an email to the blocking admin (or a nice, friendly admin that you are close with :P) explaining the sitution. I doubt they'd refuse to unblock. Failing that, the mailing list. It's one of those things that are a pain in the ass but you have to deal with. Good users shouldn't be blocked, but bad ones should be. Ahh, it's a dilemma alright :P gkhan 13:40, August 8, 2005 (UTC)

See bug #550. Bovlb 16:08:32, 2005-08-08 (UTC)

After my recent move, I was using dial-up for a while before I got broadband here, and there were several times found myself hit by an anonymous user block (and it is quite annoying, let me tell you). Of course, as an administrator, I could unblock the IP address (of course promptly reporting my actions on WP:AN/I). Nevertheless, that option is not available to most Wikipedia editors. It would be nice if IP blocks didn't affect logged-in users, but then of course vandals could just keep creating new accounts. What about allowing logged-in users to edit despite an IP block, provided their account was created prior to the block? The problem is I assume this would be quite difficult to implement in the software. Also, it doesn't address the problem of someone logging out, vandalizing, then logging back in. Do you think this happens often? I always assumed that most vandals were random Internet visitors, not registered Wikipedia editors who logged out to vandalize, then resumed their double life. — Knowledge Seeker দ 03:20, August 9, 2005 (UTC)

Can the software not recognize if your username is currently browsing or editing the site? Any users who are currently logged in during an act of vandalism couldn't (as far as I can see) also be committing vandalism with an anonymous IP, and so shouldn't be blocked. Of course, this would require that the blocking admin point out to the system the specific time-stamps of the vandalism. This wouldn't help those who are not logged in during the vandalism, but I've been blocked myself while on Wikipedia for an incedent that occured as I was logged in, and it seemed a little silly at the time. — Asbestos | Talk (RFC) 10:01, 9 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Currently, if an IP is blocked, so is any user editing via that IP. I have suggested that there should be three levels of block: 1) anon-IP blocks. These would affect an anon user editing via a particualr IP (or range) but would have no effect on a user who is logged in. 2) User blocks. These would affect a particualr user name, no matter what IP is in use. 3) anti-sockpupet blocks. Thesw ould afect a perticular IP no matter what user is using that IP, anon or logged in, just like the current IP blocks do. This typ would normally be sued ONLY when ther is reason to suspect that a user is evading a user block by changing user names or by editing without logging in. This should not be a technically hard change, but a feature change would be needed. DES ^(talk) 16:35, 9 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I believe this discussion should be moved to Wikipedia:Village pump (perennial proposals). --cesarb 18:10, 9 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Stable contents (WebDSign)

according to a Yahoo newsline dated (20050805) J. Wales said "There may soon be so-called stable contents. In this case, we'd freeze the pages whose quality is undisputed" (note added 20050810: it appears that J. Wales never said that)

a motion follows. this boils down to a proposal for modification of the Wikipedia's underlying Mediawiki software but I'm pretty sure that the idea can be consideraly enhanced on the Wikipedia side, therefore I submit it here, hoping that interested parties will share their thoughts.

Objectives

our objectives are:

avoid annoying anyone who likes the way Wikipedia works now
give to anyone who prefers reviewed articles to obtain it

the proposed method:

offers to any vsitor a way to trust or express his opinions (I like, I agree, I disagree...) about an article content

eases automatic discovery of favorites topics and opinions shared by coherent groups of Web users (it may lead to some Collaborative_filtering),

eases automatic (done by software crawling on the Web) and qualified (with conditions, for example "count only certifications made by people identified by this authority") measure of people agreement.

Approach

in order to do so each Wikipedia article may have more than one status:

'raw', meaning 'last standard content' (any existing article has this 'raw' status)

'unpolluted', meaning 'free from any vandalism'

'validated', meaning that 'a Wikipedia commission of people knowing the field validated it'

'expertised', meaning that 'a world-known expert of the field checked it ok'

any Wikimedia visitor will be able to state in his profile that, upon reading, [s]he wants to obtain the last version of any article which reached a given status. if there is no such checked version the immediate 'lower' status will be published (this is recursive)

this will not in any way annoy the reader who does not care about all those darn article status :-) because the personal profile (preferences) of each registered user will state 'raw' by default and (for registered and anonymous visitors) upon each article display a new tab will offer access to the various other 'statused' version when such versions exists

those various articles status will be expressed by cryptographic seals. it is not mandatory as most functions proposed here can be implemented using standard version-tracking tricks (taging, branching...) but some people may want to have their screwed articles published with a forged status and try to tamper the servers or network connection. let's integrate security concerns as soon as possible the [WebDSign protocol] may be the technical foundation of such seals.

Usage

all the processes (requesting-delivering-managing certificates, sealing, obtaining information about a seal...) will be done using a Web navigator.

in order to produce a seal one needs a digital certificate (X.509 or OpenPGP (PGP-GPG)), delivered (X.509) or signed (PGP) by a Certification_Authority (CA), which will be Wikipedia organization. anyone can check that a given certificate (and all informations it stores) was issued by a given CA.

any Wikipedia contributor will carry only one Wikipedia certificate, which will store many attributes stating various useful parameters. it is just like the usual username-password pair.

Giving the 'unpolluted' status

any administrator will obtain a certificate in order to let him/her give the status 'unpolluted' to any article.

Giving the 'validated' status

using the existing set of articles an automagic analysis of the volume of informations produced and its relative stability ('unpolluted' status, age and amount of readers) can establish a 'confidence score' for each author. the administrators will use those scores and deliver certificates to the best authors. those certificates will be qualified by an attribute (named 'wpexpert') listing the name of the categories of expertise of their carrier (themes, for example 'mathematics' or 'geography').

Giving the 'expertised' status

in each category this first college of 'wpexperts' will be enabled to form a college in order to elect world-known 'experts' of the field. the CA will produce certificates for them, with an 'expert' attribute storing the pertinent categories names. at first they may be not very interested in participatinf but as more and more will somewhat do emulation will raise their involvement

Scores, votes...

moreover any registered Wikipedia user may have a certificate in order to express that he agrees/likes (or disagrees/dislikes) some chunk of information in an article.

Subramanian kindly pointed to me that User:Sam_Spade/Policy_Proposals is pertinent. it leads to a huge number of interesting ideas, especially meta:Article_validation_proposals, which may be helped or help this proposal.

thoughts and comments

Now for the votes and opinions:

supported, requires discussion - I heartly agree that something like this is needed. I suggest that only two levels are used, validated and expertised: let´s keep it simple. Both would have their new contributions first added to the talk page, then either incorporated or discarded according to consensus. Also, please note that any stable status is to be dropped when an unexpected ongoing event happens to the subject of an article. - Subramanian ^talk 21:17, 9 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

two levels only: I think that there is a need for 'unpolluted' but may be wrong. this approach tolerates adding or removing a status.

yes, as soon as an expert of the category does it (those experts, as such, are probably following the trends in their categories) Natmaka 11:36, 10 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Cough. You are aware that Reuters (the actual source of the article) got it wrong? -- Cyrius|✎ 23:02, 9 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

note added in the proposal Natmaka 11:36, 10 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Well, I confess I was aware of the misunderstanding. But the discussion this guy proposes is still useful. :) Subramanian ^talk

Shh, I was waiting to see how far they went with it! --Golbez 23:05, August 9, 2005 (UTC)

Could be the "soon" specified bit more? Is the SW already developed or is it in design phase? Pavel Vozenilek 00:58, 10 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

as far as I know the code is in beta stage in Mediawiki 1.5 Natmaka 11:36, 10 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Featured article list

We surely have (too) many lists already but I think that this one would be useful:

To provide an index of our best stuff,
To provide the date of featured publication (to allow comparison of then vs now).

Lacking a list (scratch #1) could we at least provide within the featured template the date of featured publication. Thanks for your consideration and I look forward to you comments. hydnjo talk 23:07, 9 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia:Featured articles does not count? --cesarb 00:02, 10 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Oops! Yes of course, it was so obvious that I ... Well anyway what does anyone think about a date stamp in the featured template? Again, thanks for your comments. hydnjo talk 02:43, 10 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Probably a good idea. Articles change over time, so it would be worth checking some that got FA status a while back to see if they still qualify. it would also make it easier to see which one have been FA for a long while but still haven't made the front page. Grutness...wha? 04:50, 10 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

What needs to be done to make this actually happen? I dare not mess with the template. ;-) hydnjo talk 18:01, 10 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

An option in preferences to hide reverted edits.

This would make history pages look MUCH better IMHO.It would work like this: With the option on, you look at a history page (say, of George W. Bush) and things like this would be gone (this was pulled right off the top, lol):

# (cur) (last)  03:19, 10 August 2005 Zzyzx11 m (Reverted edits by 172.153.39.187 to last version by NoSeptember)
# (cur) (last) 03:17, 10 August 2005 172.153.39.187
# (cur) (last) 03:16, 10 August 2005 NoSeptember m (→Presidential campaigns - more concise)
# (cur) (last) 03:04, 10 August 2005 Bmicomp m (Reverted edits by 172.153.39.187 to last version by Gidonb)
# (cur) (last) 03:01, 10 August 2005 172.153.39.187
# (cur) (last) 02:54, 10 August 2005 Gidonb (rv; sick!)
# (cur) (last) 02:53, 10 August 2005 172.153.39.187 (Fuck Bush and Fuck the War in Iraq. Bush is a War Criminal and is well known to be a Cocksucker of the First Order)
# (cur) (last) 02:50, 10 August 2005 Everyking m (Reverted edits by 172.153.39.187 to last version by Gamaliel)
# (cur) (last) 02:49, 10 August 2005 172.153.39.187
# (cur) (last) 01:34, 10 August 2005 Gamaliel m (Reverted edits by 70.150.37.32 to last version by MONGO)
# (cur) (last) 01:33, 10 August 2005 70.150.37.32

This option would do exactly this: hide from the history page, any edits made using the rollback button that admins have, and the edit that was reverted by it. Hopefully this wouldn't be spoofable by vandals marking their edits as minor and putting in there edit summary "Reverted edits by [anon ip] to last version by [username]". Are rollback edits marked in any special way so vandals cannot spoof it? Of course, reverts by non-admin users would still show though.

Also, in the process, it would also not alert articles on your watchlist. The watchlist pulls the most recent edit, and it would only put it at the top if you open your watchlist before it was reverted by an admin. Of course you could still use the diff and old version links since it is only hiding it, not deleting it.

I think this would also discourage vandals since their 30 seconds of fame wont be seen by as many people.

What do you think of this proposal? --pile0nades^{talk | contribs} 09:03, 10 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

A better way to detect reversions: if two consecutive edits have no net effect, i.e. if there is no difference between the versions before and after them, show neither. This shouldn't be too hard to fit in the code, and problems with the processing power needed to detect this could be fixed by marking edits as reverts when the edits are made instead of when the history is pulled up. Of course, that would necessitate adding a new field to the database... ~~ N (t/c) 09:29, 10 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I assume "them" refers to the edit being reverted, and "neither" to this and the reverting edit? If so, that could work. But then, couldn't a vandal just revert back to a vandalized version and it not show, and people may miss it? --pile0nades^{talk | contribs} 10:01, 10 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

No, if they did something like:

vandalize
vandalize again
revert to version after edit #1

then it would show edit #1. The real problem, I just realized, is that this would make it hard to detect 3RR violations if people forgot to turn it off. ~~ N (t/c) 10:26, 10 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

OK, I get it. The only thing a vandal could hide is a reversion of his own vandalism! --pile0nades^{talk | contribs} 10:46, 10 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think that it would be at all appropriate for the history to hide reversions by non-admins. This would hide a great deal of edit warring, and any vandal would be able to revert any edit back to a previous version and have that earlier edit not show up on watch pages or the like.

I can see that it would be beneficial to have such a system for uses of the roll-back button, however, which admins are expected to use only in the cases of vandalism, and not edit warring. This, I think, would be fine so long as

There were a simple button at the top of the history which allows you to see all edits, including reversions,
There were some kind of flagging that reversions had been hidden, for instance making the following edit show

# (cur) (last) 01:33, 10 August 2005 Jimbo Wales m (spelling correction) [some earlier edits hidden]

or something along those lines. Beyond those three points, I think this would be a good idea. — Asbestos | Talk (RFC) 14:34, 10 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

A page-renaming template

We always face a problem of wrong titles when dealing with articles whose titles begin with a lower case letter, e.g pH. The best solution is yet to add a template as follows:

It's just the same blunder when I was editing the article am730. But recently I've discovered a very interesting template in the Chinese wikipedia to change the title of the article, see the Chinese version of pH. Then I contacted User:Zhengzhu, one of the system administrator of the Chinese wikipedia, and this's his reply:

The template you referred to in page am730 is specifically implemented in the software for the Chinese wikipedia, mainly to support cutomized conversion between traditional and simplified Chinese in the title, but people quickly found out that it can be used for other purposes as well, like the case of am730. It is fairly easy to implement this function for other languages like English, and I will be happy to do so. However you should first check with the the specific language community to see if such feature is desirable. I suggest you ask around at village pump or post to wikipedia-l and wikitech-l, and contact me again. (I am kind of on break now, with new jobs and everything...) Thanks! --Zhengzhu 17:32, 5 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I think this "template" would be of much avail to our current system. :-D -- Jerry Crimson Mann 14:23, 10 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, some of our titles appear quite awkward. Are there any cons to having this capability? hydnjo talk 18:08, 10 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

At least we won't have awkward titles anymotr. :-) -- Jerry Crimson Mann 15:36, 11 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Very nice. - Omegatron 18:19, August 10, 2005 (UTC)

For those of us that don't speak Chinese, could you link directly to the template? --Golbez 18:23, August 10, 2005 (UTC)

This is the "template" used: -{T|NEWTITLE}- -- Jerry Crimson Mann 15:36, 11 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Oh, never mind, I see - it's in the software. I misread. Is there code we can see? --Golbez 15:48, August 11, 2005 (UTC)

Who's watching

It's a proposal: how about a "Who's watching" link along with "What links here" and "Related changes" that lists all the user who are watching this particular page. I think it would be useful to estimate the popularity of the page. We could also make a [[Special:Most watched]] that list articles that have the biggest number of people watching it. CG 14:17, August 11, 2005 (UTC)

I'd prefer a simple number of people who are watching it, rather than a list. Privacy concerns. --Golbez 14:21, August 11, 2005 (UTC)

I remember suggesting something similar a few months back, and apparently then I wasn't the first. At some point previously it had apparently been rejected on the grounds that vandals would hit the pages that nobody or only a very few people were watching.

A possible way around this would be to restrict the entire feature to admins; or to just display approximate numbers (for non admins only?) below a certain threshold, e.g. This article is being watched by 20 or fewer users vs This article is being watched by 38 users.

If it was possible to show a list of users, then I think this could be restricted to beaurocrats to allay (sp?) privacy concerns and to allow the feature to be used as possibly another indication in sock-checking. If this would cause a lot of work for the servers then I don't think its worth it.

I do not think that it should be possible to see another user's watchlist as this would lead to possibilities of stalking other users. Thryduulf 16:38, 11 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]