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Wikipedia:Perennial proposals

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This is a list of things that are frequently proposed on Wikipedia, and have been rejected by the community several times in the past. It should be noted that merely listing something on this page does not mean it will never happen, but that it has been discussed before and never met consensus. Consensus can change, and some proposals which remained on this page for a long time have finally been proposed in a way which reached consensus, but you should address rebuttals raised in the past if you make a proposal along these lines. If you would like to help bring one of these proposals closer to resolution, please raise it as a community issue that needs facilitation.

Content

Content warnings

  • Proposal: Certain Wikipedia pages should display content warnings or disclaimers, such as "This article contains sexually explicit images" or "This article is not suitable for children".
  • Reasons for previous rejection: All Wikipedia pages contain a link to the Wikipedia:General disclaimer page, where you can access the content, legal, medical and risk disclaimers. See the "Disclaimers" link at the bottom of this page. In addition, Wikipedia is not censored for the protection of minors. Our mission is to document human knowledge, no matter how unpleasant or offensive it may be to some people. It is impossible to draw a line between "offensive" and "non-offensive" content that satisfies all cultural, religious and political norms. Any page could conceivably be offensive to somebody. Furthermore, once a page has loaded the disclaimer is often too late.
  • See also: Wikipedia:No disclaimers in articles. In addition, disclaimer templates are candidates for speedy deletion.

Censor offensive images

  • Proposal: Images of a sexual, obscene, or disgusting nature should be hidden from users or even deleted entirely.
  • Reasons for previous rejection: Again, Wikipedia is not censored. In an encyclopedia, it is expected that articles on sexual subjects should be illustrated as such. In addition, standards about what is and is not acceptable for pictures vary wildly between cultures.
  • See also: Wikipedia:Options to not see an image.
  • Proposal: Because of such-and-such law, Wikipedia must do so-and-so (e.g. implement censorship as above, or require identification of editors, or defer certain rulings to the U.S. Supreme Court).
  • Reasons for previous rejection: You are probably not a lawyer, and neither are most members of the community. The Wikimedia Foundation employs a lawyer who will inform us if and when such measures are necessary. The community need not use its incomplete comprehension of legality to impose restrictions upon itself. That said, certain laws are routinely enforced by common editors on Wikipedia, such as removal of copyrighted material.
  • See also: Wikipedia:Office actions and Wikipedia:List of policies#Legal and copyright.

Advertising

  • Proposal: To cover server costs, or for some other public good such as charity, Wikipedia should add advertisements to its pages. The ads could be highly-targeted, unobtrusive textual ads similar to those used by Google. Revenues would be very high based on Wikipedia's very high search engine ranking for many diverse keywords.
  • Reasons for previous rejection: Wikipedia is supposed to be neutral, which advertising by definition is not. Even if well segregated from article content, advertising could create an impression that our content is commercially influenced and could be affected by advertisers threatening to withdraw their ads, whether or not this is actually the case. Advertising could discourage contributors, the lifeblood of Wikipedia, many of whom object strongly to advertising. Placing ads would also likely decrease the amount of money raised by community fundraising. Also, since we don't allow spam or advertising by users, doing it ourselves would be, at the very least, hypocritical. Finally, the financial situation of the Wikimedia Foundation who host the website is stable and growing - there is no pressing need to make such a change.
  • See also: Wikipedia:Advertising; Spanish Wikipedia and Enciclopedia Libre.

Enforce American or British spelling

Define reliable sources

  • Proposal: Wikipedia should define the reliability of particular types of sources so that no exceptions are possible, and only sources defined as reliable may be used for the verification of Wikipedia's content. Examples include changing Wikipedia:Reliable sources from a guideline to an official policy, or merging it with Wikipedia:Verifiability and/or Wikipedia:No original research.
  • Reasons for previous rejection: Assessing the reliability of sources requires sound editorial judgment, not strict adherence to a list of rules. Although it appears possible to define a minimum threshold below which sources are never acceptable as reference for Wikipedia content, it appears presumptuous to define all sources above that threshold as "reliable". For this reason, a universally applicable (or: policy-level) definition of reliable sources is impractical. Furthermore, strict rules about what type of source is permitted amount to instruction creep.
  • See also: Wikipedia talk:Identifying reliable sources (and/or many archives of that page); Wikipedia:Attribution/Poll, which dealt with an attempted merger of the verifiability, no original research and reliable sources pages into a single official policy. Also Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard, which assesses the reliability of individual sources.
  • Proposal: To maintain their high quality, featured articles should be permanently protected or semi-protected. Alternatively, featured articles could be split into two pages: a protected page showing the article as it appeared when originally promoted, and a separate "Draft" version for any future editing the articles may need.
  • Reasons for previous rejection:
  1. Featured articles often improve over time, rather than deteriorate. Although a featured article "exemplifies our very best work and features professional standards of writing and presentation",[1] there is always room for further improvement.
  2. Featured articles are not "finished" articles. Not only do they need further editing in response to changes in the topic itself, our standards for featured articles change over time. For example, in Wikipedia's early days most featured articles did not use in-text citations. Today, such an article would have no chance of surviving a featured article discussion.
  3. While some featured articles deteriorate in quality, this is not a widespread problem. Since the featured article program began in 2004, 21% of promoted articles have been de-featured,[2] and this is mainly due to increased requirements.
  4. In regards to vandalism, our featured articles are not specifically targeted by vandals, and are among the most-watched pages on Wikipedia. Short-term semi-protection and blocks are more than adequate to deal with featured article vandalism.
  5. A link to the "originally featured version" is already available on the talk page.

Indicate Good Articles to readers

  • Proposal: Articles rated as "Good Articles" should have an indication of said status that is immediately visible to the reader, using {{icon|GA}} (similar to the standard {{icon|FA}} for featured articles.)
  • Reasons for previous rejection: Whether or not an article is a Good Article is decided by one reviewer, not by a consensus-based process like Wikipedia:Featured articles is. The presence of a GA icon may confuse or mislead readers with regards to the article's quality and accuracy. Note that in Preferences it is possible to enable this feature for most MediaWiki skins.

Move maintenance tags to talk pages

  • Proposal: Move maintenance tags such as {{cleanup}} and {{POV-check}} off the tops of articles where they are often seen as clutter and to the talk page where are they can still be seen by editors.
  • Reasons for previous rejection: Every reader is a potential editor and the maintenance tags give potential editors ideas of how to improve an article. The tags also serve as warnings to readers about potentially problematic and low-quality content. The {{ambox}} "meta-template" used by the templates means that they are not nearly as cluttered-looking as previously. The implementation costs would be large: Hundreds of thousands of articles have maintenance tags, moving them all to talk pages would be a massive undertaking, even using a bot. The documentation on all the templates, several editing help pages, and any bot or script that edits or reads maintenance tags would have to be updated.

Changes to standard appendices

  • Proposal: The standard appendices at the end of an article (e.g., See also, Notes, References, Further reading, and External links) should be changed to the system preferred by the editor/a particular professional field/the editor's school. These proposals may involve changing the names of the sections (e.g., changing References to Sources or Bibliography), changing the order of the sections (e.g., putting External links first, or References last), or changing the formatting (e.g., long lists of references should be hidden in a scrolling box).
  • Reasons for previous rejection: Policies and guidelines document "actual good practices".[3] Most proposals fail to demonstrate that their proposed practice is an emerging, sustainable alternative to the current de facto method. These guidelines only seek to document the status quo and not to change it. The See also precedes the References, Further reading, and External links; the reason for the existing order follows a logical progression from on-wiki to off-wiki information. About the names of the section headings, different academic fields use different terms, and Wikipedia editors do not want to impose the convention preferred by one academic discipline on articles in another discipline.[4]
  • See also: Many discussions in the archives of WT:Layout.

Allow non-commercial licensed content

Protecting Today's Featured Article on the main page

Excluding information for ethical/moral reasons

Editing

Prohibit anonymous users from editing

  • Proposal: Everybody should register an account before editing; IP addresses are insufficient.
  • Reasons for previous rejection: A large portion of our good edits come from IP addresses;[5] positive experiences with initial IP edits lead users to create accounts who otherwise would not do so; software features disabling IPs from creating new articles or editing semiprotected ones are sufficient. According to Jimbo Wales, "what is commonly called 'anonymous' editing is not particularly anonymous ... and there are good reasons to want vandals on ip numbers instead of accounts". While about 97% of vandalism comes from anonymous users, about 76% or 82% of anonymous edits are intended to improve the encyclopedia. (Prohibiting IP edits would not eliminate 97% of all vandalism, because those inclined to vandalism could easily take the 10 seconds to register.) The ability of anyone to edit articles without registering is a Foundation issue.
  • See also: Wikipedia:Editors should be logged in users

Automatically prompt for missing edit summary

  • Proposal: When an editor is about to post an edit without an edit summary, he or she should automatically be reminded that no summary has been provided and given another opportunity to include one. (At present, a user has the ability to configure Preferences to this option, but many users are not aware of this.)
  • Reasons for previous rejection: It's already an option in the user preferences, and forcing users to enter edit summaries may annoy them enough they will not save their (possibly constructive) edits. Manually added edit summaries also suppress the automatic edit summaries.
  • See also: Help:Preferences#Editing

All words and phrases should be linked

Talk pages and discussions

Prohibit removal of warnings

  • Proposal: Editors should be prohibited from removing warning templates from their talk page.
  • Reasons for previous rejection: Talk pages are not intended as a permanent record of a user's misbehavior. Warnings are frequently placed incorrectly or spuriously. Removal of warnings other than to archive them is strongly discouraged, but does constitute definitive proof that the warning was seen, and can lead to escalated warnings. Revert warring to keep a warning on a user's talk page is disruptive and constitutes "biting" newcomers.
  • See also: Wikipedia:Centralized discussion/Removing warnings

Use a bot to welcome new users

  • Proposal: Some people get missed for weeks at a time, or never welcomed at all. Wouldn't it be better to have a bot drop one of the welcome templates on newcomers' pages instead of depending upon volunteers of the welcoming committee?
  • Reasons for previous rejection: In general, this proposal comes up every few months at Wikipedia talk:Welcoming committee, the village pump, or the bot requests page. There are multiple reasons behind rejection:
  1. If a bot is used, it is cold and impersonal, and the bot is incapable of mentoring and assisting newcomers.
  2. Many vandals are exposed when an edit made by them receives extra scrutiny, because one user page or another shows as a redlink.
  3. The bot would make thousands of pointless edits welcoming vandals and accounts that never make an edit.

Disallow personalized signatures

  • Proposal: Editors should use only plain signatures. Personalized signatures (colored text, HTML, special characters, etc.) are inherently disruptive, draw too much attention to the user, are often poorly designed, and/or take up too much space in the edit window.
  • Reasons for previous rejection: Most custom signatures cause little or no trouble. In addition, they are widely popular throughout Wikipedia, and forcing users to give them up would create more trouble than it's worth. It's better to deal with unacceptable signatures on a case-by-case basis than to issue a blanket prohibition that would anger many users, with few or no benefits. Furthermore, a user whose username uses non-Latin characters could use a custom signature to display an alternate name that English speakers could understand.
  • See also: Wikipedia:Signatures#Customizing your signature.

Deletion

Numerical rules for deletion

All authors must be notified of deletion

  • Proposal: The first creator, or everybody who has contributed to an article, must be warned on their talk page of a deletion debate of that article.
  • Reasons for previous rejection: Excessive bureaucracy; people are expected to keep pages important to them on their watchlist. The "first creator" is meaningless for many articles, as this person may have long since left or made few contributions; "everybody" can number several hundred people, including those who have made trivial edits to the article and aren't concerned whether or not it's deleted. Regardless, some editors opt to notify the original author of an article when his or her article is nominated for deletion; this is strictly optional.

Deleted pages should be visible

Delete no-consensus AfDs for biographies of living persons

  • Proposal: Deletion discussions for biographies of living persons (BLPs) where there is no consensus for keeping the article should result in deletion.
  • Reasons for previous rejection: In articles that meet Wikipedia's criteria for inclusion, most BLP-related problems do not require deletion of the article. Policy on consensus requires consensus for deletion as well as for edits. (One exception: Biographies that are entirely negative in tone and unsourced are considered attack pages, which makes them eligible for speedy deletion under criterion G10.)

Adminship

Requests for Adminship is broken

Too many questions at RfA

  • Proposal: Limit the number of questions asked at RfA, limit the number of questions a person can ask, limit the types of questions asked, not allow additional questions to be asked, or ban canned questions.
  • Reason for previous rejection: RfA is a discussion and people may need to be able to ask questions they find pertinent towards making a decision. People should be able to ask the questions they want/need to ask to make an assessment based upon their individual criteria.
  • Note: While there has been no consensus to ban canned questions, they have routinely been criticized as not being effective or adding much value to the process.

Demote inactive admins

  • Proposal: Inactive admins should have their admin status revoked automatically after a given time period. The general reasoning behind this is that the accounts might be compromised, or that an administrator who left a few years ago may not be suitable for today's Wikipedia without going through another RFA.
  • Reasons for previous rejection: In general, this policy has been opposed both by administrators who themselves tend to go through periods of inactivity and do not wish to be forced to maintain token levels of activity to maintain adminship, and by people who believe that there is no substantive security concern. The developers have pointed out that an active account is in far greater danger of becoming compromised than an inactive account. A side effect is that this may raise a barrier for inactive admins to become active again.
  • See also: Wikipedia:Inactive administrators, and an April 2008 discussion and poll, Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/desysop poll

Reconfirm administrators

  • Proposal: Administrators should have their status reconfirmed through RFA or an RFA-like process, either periodically or on demand.
  • Reasons for previous rejection:
  1. There are already 856 administrators. Periodically reconfirming them would be an onerous and time-consuming process. For example, with annual reconfirmation, there would be 15+ reviews per week. Endorsements of uncontroversial admins would consume much of the schedule, while the "wait time" to review admins who are controversial could be on the order of months.
  2. Reconfirmation "on demand" has faced objections about potential abuse. Although no proposal for mandatory reconfirmation has achieved consensus, some administrators have voluntarily joined Category:Wikipedia administrators open to recall, agreeing to stand for reconfirmation if requested to do so by a sufficient number of editors in good standing.
  3. The Arbitration process can address problems that arise from accusations of administrator misconduct.

Hierarchical structures

  • Proposal: There should be some kind of "partial admin" that gets certain admin powers, but not all of them. Or, new admins should undergo a probationary period, which may include limited abilities or desysopping on demand.
  • Can't be done: It's confusing; if we can't trust people to use their tools sensibly, they don't become admins. Period. A "partial admin" process would at least double the already considerable frictional effort expended at WP:RFA, as users debate who gets full sysop powers versus who gets only partial abilities.
  • Already been done: The rollback power is available to trustworthy non-admins upon request.
  • See also: Wikipedia:Limited administrators.

Prerequisites for adminship

  • Proposal: To reduce the number of failed RFAs, all candidates should meet certain requirements, such as a minimum edit count, contributions to featured content, or participation in internal Wikipedia processes like articles for deletion.
  • Reasons for previous rejection: While candidates with few edits and/or a lack of project-space contributions often fail per WP:SNOW or WP:NOTNOW, there are always exceptions. The encyclopedia should not lose out on a good candidate just because he or she has not achieved an arbitrary number of edits or does not frequent a particular area of the encyclopedia. In addition, edit counts are not a reliable indicator of an editor's experience or competence. It is better to evaluate candidates on the quality of their contributions, not the quantity of their edits. Finally, no one agrees on what the prerequisites should be.

It should be easier to remove adminship

Grant non-admins admin functions within their user space

  • Proposal: Allow non-administrators to administer their user space, with the tools technically limited to that space only. This has been proposed in a number of different ways, ranging from individual abilities (such as deletion), to full admin abilities.
  • Reasons for previous rejection: Lack of need; admin workload is not high enough to justify this. Possible security concerns. Gives the impression of user space ownership, which has been rejected by the developers and the Wikipedia community.

Administrators should be of the Age of majority

  • Proposal: Administrators should either indicate or prove at their request for adminship that they have reached the age of majority in the country in which they reside.
  • Reasons for previous rejection: Legal protection for the editor and the Foundation. No consensus to implement this; editors are free to use this as a personal rationale for opposing.
  • See also: Wikipedia:Ageism, Wikipedia:Age and adminship

Technical

Create a counter of people watching a page

  • Proposal: A feature request for a button or some other means to find out how many people are watching a certain page.
  • Reasons for previous rejection: Such a button could be abused by vandals, who can then find unwatched pages to vandalize. Note that admins have a page that lists unwatched pages.
  • A function to see how many people are watching a certain page now exists at toolserver, it is limited to show the number of watchers only if it is 30 or higher.
  • See also: Wikipedia talk:Special:UnwatchedPages, MW:Manual:$wgAllowPageInfo. This option does exist in the software, but it's switched off on the English Wikipedia.

Allow watchlisting individual sections of a page

  • Proposal: Allow specific sections of pages to be watched, so people don't have to watch an entire page to monitor only a small portion of the sections on large discussion pages such as WP:ANI.
  • Reasons for previous rejection: While most people agree this would be a good idea, the technical implementation would be very difficult. Currently watchlisting is done per-page and each page has a unique ID number in the database. Sections however, are very fluid. They are assigned a number on the page they are on, but adding or removing sections above it will change the number. The name of the section can also be changed easily and new sections can be created with the same name.
  • See also: Section level watch, Sections can't be watched, Watch one section of a large article, and mw:Extension:LiquidThreads, a forum-like system for discussion pages that would allow watching individual threads, currently under development.

Use reCAPTCHA

  • Proposal: Use the reCAPTCHA CAPTCHA system in place of our own so that we aid in the digitization of text while deterring spammers.
  • Reasons for previous rejection: The primary reasons for rejection are from Brion Vibber, our former CTO, who states that it is proprietary (Wikimedia prefers to use free and open source software), they won't let us run it on our own servers (it introduces a dependency on an external server by forcing MediaWiki to contact the server for CAPTCHA verification), the words are rarely readable, and it has a weak audio CAPTCHA.

Notes

  1. ^ From Wikipedia:Featured article criteria, as of April 2, 2008.
  2. ^ As of March 2008, there are 1,979 featured articles and 511 former featured articles (541 that have lost featured status minus 30 that have regained it). If you divide the 511 former featured articles by the 2490 articles that have ever been featured, 21% of FAs have been de-featured.
  3. ^ See Policies and guidelines: "Sources of Wikipedia policy"
  4. ^ A majority of articles follow either the APA style (psychology) and Council of Science Editors style guide (all physical sciences) in naming the primary list of citations "References"; this proposal usually comes from someone who is familiar with the conventions used in history or the humanities.
  5. ^ Wikipedia Statistics - Tables - English, accessed April 2 2008; Who Writes Wikipedia?. Aaron Swartz's Raw Thought; accessed April 2 2008.

See also

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