Wikipedia:Village pump (idea lab)
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Hi all,
I'm a multi-language Wikipedia user (mainly English, Persian, Arabic, and German) and I do a lot of searches in Wikipedia. The thing is that I have to switch between different Wikis when I change language. This is redundant and tedious for me and I would like to have a functionality where I can "turn on" different languages and have results from those wikis when I search. I raised the issue here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Teahouse#Searching_in_multiple_Wikipedias_simultaneously in Tea House and was told that it does not exist. I was also told that it wouldn't hurt to raise the subject with you guys other than being laughed at ;D.
Would love to have your feedback.
Cheers Alireza1357 (talk) 08:09, 11 May 2017 (UTC)
- @Alireza1357: There is an ancient phabricator task at phab:T3837. As we can presently activate "multi-project" search (I don't know if that's used here or not off the cuff), I expect that you will be able to multi-language search sooner-rather-than later. But no, you cannot do this at present. --Izno (talk) 12:19, 11 May 2017 (UTC)
- Hi @Alireza1357: - we have an update coming soon to all wikis that will display additional information for each search result returned, to include the languages that are available to read that article in. You can read more on our A/B testing page and our self-guided testing page would be a wonderful read for you too. Basically, by enabling a small change to your common.js file (once you've logged in), you can see these 'explore similar' results right now. We're working on setting up the actual A/B tests for the explore similar feature now, and would love to hear your feedback on what we've got accomplished so far. It's not exactly what you've asked for in your posting, but we hope that it'll help you out regardless. Cheers, DTankersley (WMF) (talk) 21:20, 11 May 2017 (UTC)
Thanks @Izno: and @DTankersley (WMF): Looking at the material you provided, it seems to me that the project is heading in the direction where such or similar functionality will be included. But what I was looking for is (IMHO) simpler and a little bit different than what is there right now. Do you think it is worth further exploration? Has it a chance to be accepted and implemented? Do I need to further clarify what I had in mind? Thanks in advance Alireza1357 (talk) 08:18, 12 May 2017 (UTC)
LTA KnowledgeBase follow-up
@There'sNoTime and Samwalton9: There was a bit of delay, but as per the closing statement, the proposal for an LTA KnowledgeBase has been accepted by the community, and the closers have indicated a few things to resolve before we move forward. Now might be a good time to plan how we're going to set up the discussion that'll hammer those "finer details" out. The two questions (in summary) are: 1) what are we going to do with the existing LTA material, and 2) who should have access to the LTA KnowledgeBase?
The closers indicated that the first question may not require a formal, structured RfC to discuss, as most were in agreement that existing LTA reports were to remain on-wiki, and that "generic information" will continue to be provided on-wiki regarding reports in the KnowledgeBase. Just to throw an idea out, this information could perhaps be a list of usernames of sockmasters and their SPIs.
According to the closing statement, the second question likely requires a more thorough discussion. Here are a few ideas for the required experience level to have access to the KnowledgeBase that were thrown out in the first RfC, from most restrictive to least restrictive:
- Option A: "somewhere between that of NPP and OTRS, requiring sufficient time and experience working on anti-vandalism work" - from the original proposal
- Option B: "anyone with any of the various admin-granted user rights (rollback, reviewer, autopatrol etc)" - from Hut 8.5
- Option C: "extended confirmed" (500 edits, 30 days account registration) - various people suggested this one
- Option D: anyone who is generally "a good contributor" in the eyes of a tool admin - from my and Dat Guy's comments
The goal is to reduce the problem with WP:BEANS while maintaining a degree of transparency. I believe there was also some talk of separating the ability to view LTA pages and to edit them. I'm thinking we could have an RfC where editors can vote on these options. What do you all think? Mz7 (talk) 21:17, 12 May 2017 (UTC)
- A couple notes:
- It didn't end up in the close (Primefac drafted and I didn't care to move too far away from his fairly-reasonable draft), but I noted during my review that there were several editors who said "at least all admins", which I would guess no-one has an issue with. This is actually the most restrictive option I believe, if the RFC is anything to go by (there are more restrictive lists, but I think those are neither practical nor obviously supported in 'preliminary' RFC just-closed).
- It did end up in the close, but you didn't mention it above: The privacy aspects of the data on the private database need to be sorted, and we kind of shoehorned that into the first bullet.
- Also another set of comments that did not end up mentioned in the close but which immediately puzzled me--why is this a separate tool and not a simple (private) wiki being proposed?
- In addition, I had a separate comment: There is a technical solution to the concern above providing "enough" information on-wiki while preserving some amount of consistency on the private wiki, and that is to mirror pages here (using a bot, probably) based on pages there which are dedicated to summarizing the LTA's activities. It was, however, explicit in the close that the current pages should be preserved, so perhaps some research into the depth of which the current pages go into might be a desirable activity prior to proposing this part of the RFC. You might consider broad classes of information as well as the depth of each class, and whether the BEANS implications are relevant to each class of information, each as a question or two in the RFC. --Izno (talk) 21:59, 12 May 2017 (UTC)
- To be honest, given that Community Tech is going to be building some kind of harassment/LTA tool, I think we should put discussions about access level on hold until we see what it looks like and what content it holds. I'm sure the RfC we held will still usefully feed into that work. Sam Walton (talk) 22:32, 12 May 2017 (UTC)
Wikipedia articles to get a format like the standard scientific articles
I recommend to Wikipedia to give to each article a format similar to the scientific articles. For each Wikipedia article should be provided an Editorial Information just like it is the case for scientific articles. For example, when Imake a citation to an Wikipedia Article, I want just to write in this way: Wikipedia- bird, Wikipedia Publishing, 004567-263 (article code), 2017-05-16 (the date of last update from Wiki), 2016 — Preceding unsigned comment added by Tbaracu (talk • contribs) 12:25, 16 May 2017 (UTC)
- On any article in main space there will be a group of tools on the left hand side. Look for "Cite this page" (probably the last-but-one tool) and click on it. You will see Bibliographic details and citations for the page in a selection of styles. For instance go to the page Text messaging, click on the tool and you can see that the appropriate Chicago style citation is:
Wikipedia contributors, "Text messaging," Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia,
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Text_messaging&oldid=780667303 (accessed May 16, 2017)
Regards, Martin of Sheffield (talk) 14:57, 16 May 2017 (UTC)
WikiSandy (Contextually Enhanced Search)
Provide a Wikipedia search service that indexes Wikipedia data semantically, based on sentence structure; subject, subject complement, or direct object, etc. versus just key words. Recognize information that is not directly communicated by the author, by relating acronyms, abbreviations, and compound nouns to appropriate subject matter within an article. Results will be ordered and prioritized by the strength of the correlation of search term to the sentences returned. Results will provide full sentences where possible, with deep links to those sentences, making it possible for users to jump directly to those sentences of interest. Such a tool will improve the search experience within Wikipedia and increase the value of the Wikipedia data. Any help or feedback would be greatly appreciated.
See a demo at www.wikisandy.org — Preceding unsigned comment added by Sandypondfarm (talk • contribs) 14:30, 17 May 2017 (UTC)
Regards Thomas Cowley [[1]] — Preceding unsigned comment added by Sandypondfarm (talk • contribs) 13:57, 19 May 2017 (UTC)
About creating CAS redirect pages of chemical substances
For example, 13160-06-0 redirects to 3-Pyridylnicotinamide. A chemical compound may have different names. It's easy to find whether one chemical exists in Wikipedia or not by typing CAS numbers. Moreover, when the name of a compound is complicated, CAS number will be a good way to search the compound. --Leiem (talk) 09:30, 19 May 2017 (UTC)
Religions various time lines
Religions various time lines -Could i suggest
could i suggest and request a page that or pages that lists time lines for various religions , particularly say Judaism starting from say200BC or life of Abraham if he is indeed the starting point and progress gradually thorough to say year 1AD or 314 AD or even up to modern times. It sounds simple but i cannot find this information online . also a time line of the different religions that preceded Judaism would be nice also to help me and others understand what religions were actually practiced in the middle east prior to modern day monotheism , particularly say in the Saudi area and other middle eastern societies in times prior to Islam
hope this makes sense ,
yours gratefully simon from Australia