Jump to content

Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by 78.143.206.161 (talk) at 14:09, 11 October 2016 (→‎Proposal: Amend page title element to remove "Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia"). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

 Policy Technical Proposals Idea lab WMF Miscellaneous 
Shortcuts

New ideas and proposals are discussed here. Before submitting:


Proposal: make protection of example pages consistent

I am going to open a community discussion about our various example pages, with the goal of making the content consistent and identifying whether any should be listed as potential merged/delete targets. My list so far is is below; please let me know if I missed any.

As a start, I would like to propose that all of the pages in the list below and all associated subpages be protected with 30/500 extended confirmed protection indefinite semiprotection and full move protection. Right now the protection is all over the map; most are unprotected, some are semiprotected, and one subpage of a semiprotected page (User:Example/Lipsum) is fully protected. These are high-visibility pages, are often vandalized, and there should be no reason for a new editor to change them. --Guy Macon (talk) 18:50, 3 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

List of top-level example pages:

(Feel free to add to the above list --Guy Macon (talk) 18:50, 3 October 2016 (UTC))[reply]

Should we apply indefinite semiprotection and full move protection to example pages?

(Changed from "Should we apply 30/500 extended confirmed protection to example pages?" per compelling argument below.)

Comment: At present, User:Example is under indefinite semiprotection and full move protection. That seems about right. It is hard to get too excited about the others, but perhaps someone can give a convincing reason for protection. Extended confirmed protection is still controversial and it doesn't seem to be the best choice here. EdJohnston (talk) 02:33, 6 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

  • If you look at the rationale given for WP:PREEMPTIVE, it clearly applies to articles, which indeed anyone should be able to edit. There is zero reason a brand-new editor should be mucking around with example pages, templates, etc. While the pages have only attracted a few non-autoconfirmed vandals over the years,[1][2][3] the main reason I think they should be semiprotected is because so many pages -- including high-visibility policy pages and noticeboard discussions -- link to them[4][5][6] that they are high visibility. --Guy Macon (talk) 15:50, 6 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
    Well, if they don't get much vandalism, I don't see a reason to protect them. Also, I've seen problems in the past with unwarranted non-article protections causing pages to fall out of date, so I am concerned such a thing may happen there as well. So oppose. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 19:04, 6 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Proposals to create new "all" BLP tracking categories being held up

I have put in requests here, here, and here for template edits to populate useful new tracking categories. Without greater attention, a single editor has been able to completely derail the requests. Please weigh in here! —swpbT 19:28, 6 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Beuller? —swpbT 16:33, 7 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Pending Changes bot

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

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

It should probably be feasable; the place where you would need to discuss this would probably be at Wikipedia:Bot requests. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 04:46, 7 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
OTOH, this would be the better venue to try to establish consensus for such a bot. Anomie⚔ 22:12, 9 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

A bot to replace curly quotation marks?

Hey, I'm not too sure about this being significant enough, so I'd like to get consensus first. Would it be good if I set up a bot which replaced curly quotation marks (“”) with standard quotation marks ("") per the MoS, then use AWB to do it? If that isn't significant enough, could I make it put in this template which informs users that there are curly quotes that need to be replaced instead? PhilrocMy contribs 13:00, 7 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Consider reviewing the discussion at WT:MOS#Measures in support of MOS:CURLY. --Izno (talk) 13:03, 7 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Animals don't adapt.

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

Please provide scholarly sources which say so. Staszek Lem (talk) 20:48, 7 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
And especially don't make edits like this:[7][8] without citation to scholarly sources which back up your rather *cough* unusual opinions about whether species adapt to environmental changes. --Guy Macon (talk) 22:00, 7 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Without a specific context a general context for your comment must be assumed. And in a general context, your comment is false. Animals can adapt. Animals adapt (i.e., change their behavior) all the time to suit the current environment. I suspect you are referring to "adapt" in terms of evolutionary change of species and in that regard you have a point but without specific examples, I'm be unwilling make any general statement like it's always incorrect to say "Animals adapt". Language has a surprisingly large amount of flexibility. I can perfectly well imagine sentences where somebody writes "Animals adapt" and they are using the word "animal" as a direct synonym for "species" and saying "species adapt" is surely not objectionable. There's lots of play here possible with the semantics, especially if the word "animal" is referring to an individual or a species. Your proposal doesn't seem fleshed out enough for serious consideration. Anyway, I can't imagine that there are so many instances that you cannot tackle this as a personal issue. WP:Be Bold and fix it. Jason Quinn (talk) 18:09, 8 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
They shouldn't be so bold as to "fix it" without strong cited source support. Obvious enough to you and me, apparently not so obvious to the OP. ―Mandruss ☎ 19:25, 8 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Adapted by whom, one wonders? Chuntuk (talk) 13:24, 10 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
It is usually best to avoid the passive tense unless the subject of the sentence is implicit. For example do not say "animals were adapted," say "x adapted the animals." Which raises the question, who or what adapted the animals? TFD (talk) 03:18, 11 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
The passive should be used when the subject is unknown, unknowable or irrelevant. Consider: "the starting gun was fired and the runners surged forward...", no one cares or knows who fired the gun. Using a dislike of the passive to try to imply that a conciousness is required to drive evolution is a poor bit of rhetoric. Martin of Sheffield (talk) 08:59, 11 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Rate Limit for All Users

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

That would, IMO, be a major overreaction. Yes these things may happen sometimes but I think the people on this site, the community as it were, need to find a threshold of risk they are willing to accept for this sort of thing. It's a public and open site for the most part so I think we need to accept that occasionally, in that type of environment, these things will happen. When they do, we deal with them accordingly, not limit otherwise trustworthy users just in case and limit the amount of improvements are done in Wikipedia. That, to me, would be far worse and would have far greater impact than simply blocking and reverting the edits of the occasional vandal. Mr. Nosferatu (talk) 03:11, 9 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
No need to rate restrict everyone to get rid of this, just remove (or limit) Twinkle's ability to do global unlinking. I've seen other vandals using Twinkle to do this exact same thing, and in my opinion it's just too dangerous a feature to have unrestricted. Meters (talk) 03:31, 9 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I regularly edit pages in groups of 64 open tabs (things like replacing "The the" with "The" or "the") and then submit all my changes in rapid succession. A global rate limit would inconvenience me. --Guy Macon (talk) 03:55, 9 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

List of redirects

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

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

I want to ask a question.

how can i display

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

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

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

Wikipedian Effectiveness Training

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

Require consensus for candidate article edits through the election.

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

I think first we should try to address the root of the problem. News media for better or worse has portrayed Clinton in a better light than her competitors - Sanders, Trump, Johnson and Stein, and therefore we should expect that the relevant articles do as well, per neutrality. But some supporters of Clinton's opponents think we should redress what they see as media bias, which is against policy. Similarly, some Clinton supporters think we should remove negative information covered in the media because they do not think it is "relevant." Is there any way we can ensure that policies are followed in editing these articles? TFD (talk) 00:22, 11 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose - Discretionary sanctions are in place at all articles mentioned. I haven't visited others in a while, but the DS appear to be working adequately at Trump. If they fail to work adequately, it can only be because they are not being adequately enforced. ―Mandruss ☎ 00:26, 11 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  • Thanks, but Oppose any prior restraint. If people have to get advance consent before any article edits then article improvement would grind completely to a halt, if it hasn't already. Might as well just edit protect all the articles. I think a little more vigilance is in order for tendentious edits: editors must obtain consensus before any significant edit they know or ought to know to be disputed. If they keep doing it, then warnings and sanctions apply. Also, clarify that whereas BRD are okay, BRRD is not. - Wikidemon (talk) 00:37, 11 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose. I do genuinely appreciate the spirit behind the proposal, but discretionary sanctions + a rigorous adherence to BLP, RS, V, and BRD should be sufficient here. In other words, we should rigorously enforce the content policies we already have. I also find "all edits" to be very broad - what about ref fixes, general copy edits, typo fixes, adding wikilinks, and so forth? Neutralitytalk 01:51, 11 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose- I can only speak for editing patterns at the Donald Trump article. Not needed. Sanctions and watchful editors are in place. Buster Seven Talk 02:49, 11 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose There is no need for this. Semi-protection eliminates most of the silly stuff; discretionary sanctions (eventually) take care of POV warring. The articles I am active at (mostly Trump related) are closely watched and they seem to be operating fairly civilly, with the talk page in use for anything controversial. Routine editing, updating, correcting etc. is being done responsibly. A few timely topic bans have also been helpful. A look at the Clinton article suggests it is a little more problematic, but people seem to be dealing with the problems efficiently. --MelanieN (talk) 03:03, 11 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose. Our typical WP:BRD process works fine here, and why turn away potential new editors when they could learn something and begin to edit productively? I created an account over a year ago because I saw a TfD notice within the infobox of a random comedian article and I disagreed with it at the time. It wouldn't be that weird for someone to come here for political reasons and choose to stick around productively. ~ Rob13Talk 03:14, 11 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose — I have been watching the Donald Trump article and his campaign article for months and there have been only minor problems. There is no reason to hamper editors who are trying to make legitimate edits.--Jack Upland (talk) 04:42, 11 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

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

A discussion on VPP [9] notes that when a wikipedia page is saved, the default filename, derived from the page's <title></title> value, will be in the form Article Name - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The suggestion is that this is a bit of a pain, and that Article Name - Wikipedia would better suffice.

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

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

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

  • Strong Support. We already have "Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia" on every page (look at the globe at the upper left). Adding it to other places feels sort of spammy. --Guy Macon (talk) 01:15, 11 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support - for conciseness, and because most of the world already knows by now that Wikipedia is the (a?) free encyclopedia. ―Mandruss ☎ 05:02, 11 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  • Strong Support. - and not only for conciseness, but also for consistency -- Wikipedia articles in most other languages manage well without the extra-long tag.
  • Support These titles end up in browser tabs. Short titles are much more workable. The free encyclopedia doesn't really add information, so no need to repeat it in every tab title. Jahoe (talk) 11:03, 11 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support, but change the hyphen - to an en dash – as well. (Hyphen is stylistically inappropriate here.) Jc86035 (talk) Use {{re|Jc86035}}
    to reply to me     11:26, 11 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Jc86035 — en-dashes are not allowed in file-names on a number of operating systems, so we cannot do that. Carl Fredrik 💌 📧 13:47, 11 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
@CFCF: French Wikipedia uses an em dash Article — Wikipédia… In addition, there are quite a number of articles which already use en- or em-dashes in their titles. How is en-dashes not being allowed in filenames an issue? Jc86035 (talk) Use {{re|Jc86035}}
to reply to me 13:53, 11 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support - but be careful -- articles on the same subject in different languages do not carry the same information. It is often rewarding to compare them. So conflicts might arise. Thus English without ',the free encyclopedia' would conflict with the Italian version, but not with the German -- but only if the titles are the same. It might take a combination of characters, not just dashes, to solve this easy problem of distinguishing languages.
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Village_pump_(proposals)&oldid=743828129"