Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)

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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Thivierr (talk | contribs) at 03:23, 12 December 2005 (→‎Expansion of CSD A7). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

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The policy section of the village pump is used to discuss existing and proposed policies.

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Policy 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.

Why will they be permanently removed, rather than permanently archived? Derex 21:37, 23 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Extra lines

I have decided that I want to edit Wikipedia in the classic skin. This skin does not put a line under 2nd level headers, as the default skin does. However, I like the lines, so from now on everyone should insert an extra line above the 2nd level header so the articles look good for me. 

 ----
 ==Heading==

Thanks, Gerard Foley 01:52, 27 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I think the Wikipedia article about how the world does not revolve around you might be appropriate reading material. Anyone know the link for that offhand? DreamGuy 00:28, 28 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Perhaps Wikipedia:Words of wisdom? -- Rick Block (talk) 00:36, 28 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
AKA WP:WORLD. -Splashtalk 00:32, 6 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Solipsism-gadfium 00:39, 29 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I also edit in the classic skin, in no small part because I loathe those lines. If you really want them, though, put the following in User:Gmcfoley/standard.css: 

h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6 { padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom: 1px solid #CCCCCC; }
#article h1, #article h2, #article h3, #article h4, #article h5, #article h6 { margin-bottom: 0.3em; }

—Cryptic (talk) 23:38, 28 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, thanks for the advice. I was not actually serious about this, it’s to do with a dispute over on Wiktionary, where this is common practice. I want these extra lines removed, however Hippietrail said we should wait for comments from Eclecticology because he edits in the classic skin. I just wanted to see how people would react to a request to add them here just because someone wants to edit in the classic skin. You can see the discussion at wikt:Wiktionary:Beer parlour#Four dashes. Gerard Foley 20:26, 30 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Expansion of CSD A7

I've started a discussion some time ago at Wikipedia talk:Criteria for speedy deletion#Expansion of A7 but I suppose the proper procedure would be to add it here to make a it formal policy proposal.

In short, my proposal is to expand CSD A7 to include non-notable groups of people as well as individuals. This would apply to bands, clubs, organizations, couples, families, and any other collections of individuals that do not assert their importance or significance. Discussion has been taking place on the talk page so please add your comments there, but I'll start the voting here. howcheng [ t • c • w • e ] 22:13, 28 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Support
  1. howcheng [ t • c • w • e ] 22:13, 28 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  2. Turnstep 22:47, 28 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  3. Groups of non-notable individuals are inhenently non-notable. Titoxd(?!?) 23:28, 28 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  4. Although I don't know how much load it will take off AfD, it's a good idea.--Sean|Black 23:30, 28 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  5. That would simply be common sense. In particular bands appear very often on AFD. Radiant_>|< 00:02, 29 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  6. Sounds good as long as it's clear that this still only applies to groups with no remotely plausible assertion of notability (not simply non-notable ones, even if they fall somewhat below, e.g., WP:MUSIC). Also, for the polls are evil crowd, there's been lots of discussion. Now what's wrong with an informal poll to gauge the general consensus among many users? -- SCZenz 00:21, 29 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  7. Support as per previous discussion. --Carnildo 00:58, 29 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  8. Support. It's a very sensible proposal. PJM 17:19, 29 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  9. Support. I'm not sure how useful this will really be — what vanity band article doesn't assert notability of one form or another? — but that's also why I don't think this extension would do any harm. —Bunchofgrapes (talk) 23:34, 29 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
    I've seen a few band articles go by that don't even assert existance, much less any sort of notability. --Carnildo 00:12, 30 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  10. Support. This has such widespread community support that I find it odd that some people are insisting on a vote, when merely reading the discussion would show which way the wind blows. But if you insist on counting heads, count mine. Nandesuka 00:16, 30 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  11. Support. Protects Wikipedia from abuse. Susvolans ⇔ 16:59, 30 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  12. A no-brainer. -Splashtalk 19:31, 30 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  13. Support. -- Kjkolb 19:58, 30 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  14. Support per Titoxd and Carnildo and because it might mean fewer articles in AfD.--Alhutch 00:35, 1 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  15. Support; logical extension of A7, which has been very successful. Though, I think consensus for this is clear enough that we don't really need a poll... --Aquillion 09:40, 4 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  16. Strong support, I nominate 5-6 bands per day for AFD and virtually none are kept. Stifle 00:32, 10 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  17. Obviously needed. Martin 00:42, 10 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  18. Strongest Support Ever In The Universe Heck, I already use CSD A7 for groups. karmafist 01:14, 10 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  19. Please! Ashibaka tock 04:47, 11 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  20. Support. Blackcap (talk) (vandalfighters, take a look) 03:16, 12 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose
  1. Oppose. This proposal was rejected by the community originally, and is open to substantial abuse with no oversight. Trollderella 22:14, 29 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
    • Wrong. This has never been proposed to the community, not to mention rejected. It has been discussed in at least four seperate places and there were no serious objections. Radiant_>|< 23:05, 29 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
      • Actually, it is you who are wrong. This was part of the original CSD proposal, and was rejected. You know it was. Please stop with the misinformation. Trollderella 23:24, 29 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
        • That's a very funny remark from you, but you're definitely wrong. If you'd read through WP:CSD/P, you'd see that there's no proposal that refers to groups of people. If you think otherwise, show us the link. Radiant_>|< 01:17, 30 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  2. Oppose. This is too ad-hoc a way to go about changing such a major page Be cautious - SoM 00:24, 30 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
    • How do you want it done? There's been discussion forever, and now a broader consensus is being requested on a very public page. Can you suggest something that would be less ad hoc, please? -- SCZenz 01:27, 30 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  3. Oppose and I actually would rather CSD A7 was not a criterion. I have rescued the odd article from there, Roddy Llewellyn springs to mind, and lost the odd one to before I could rescue it. I wish people would spend more time just sourcing articles and bringing them to an encyclopedic quality rather than willy nilly deleting them because they can't even take the time to google the subject. Surely we haven't got half the articles we should have, and that should be a concern more pressing than worrying about articles we may not need. Steve block talk 20:37, 30 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  4. Oppose - Poorly thought out, and overly broad. This seems like an attempt to delete many things that would surivive an AFD. --Rob 17:38, 1 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
    How so? Ashibaka tock 04:47, 11 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
    The word "groups" of people can mean pretty much anything. I think there's probably consensus for small musical bands, that have been saved by technical rules, and are guarenteed deletion via WP:MUSIC. But, the word "group" of individuals is awfully broad, and could been any organization of any size, of any time, of any degree of formal or legal status. Speedy deletion is only supposed to be designed to handle a subset of articles where's there's a well established consensus to delete. Also, if an article on an individual makes no notable claim, its unlikely there's such a claim to make, but its quite possible a larger well known group of people could be be famous, but the author fails to state they're famous explcitly, as some groups are so famous, one might think it goes without saying (e.g. a famous big city orchestra, a professional sports team, or an article about a famous charity that's attempt to be non-promotional is deemed as not making a notable claim). Oddly, this proposal favors ad-copy (which typically makes claims of notability) over NPOV works (which sticks to the facts, and doesn't boast). --Rob 03:23, 12 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  5. Oppose. Existing speedies are sufficient. -- JJay 04:09, 10 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
    Please look at the talk page linked to above. There are a lot of useless articles (such as obvious band vanity) that have to suffer through AfD right now. Ashibaka tock 04:47, 11 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Polls are evil! (And can't we discuss this instead?)
  1. Kim Bruning 00:05, 29 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  2. Hey, I started the Polls are Evil page. Stop polling and start healthy discussion. -User:Fennec (はさばくのきつね) 00:10, 29 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
    Funny, because I see a link to a discsussion in the first post in this thread.--Sean|Black 00:11, 29 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
    Excellent, so you can continue doing that then. Kim Bruning 01:03, 29 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
    Discussion has been going on since November 3. It seemed there was enough consensus on approving this. If you disagree, you could contribute to the discussion there. howcheng [ t &#149; c &#149; w &#149; e ] 16:53, 29 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
    Then it is approved. Go forth and implement! Kim Bruning 16:57, 29 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
    You got reverted, so apparently there was still opposition. Try discuss some more! Kim Bruning 05:20, 10 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with former USER: Wyss!

Because Wikipedia's applied sourcing methodologies are not at academic levels across its content I will no longer be participating in this project. I have also pondered the thought that Wikipedia's internal group dynamics more resemble those of a charismatic religious (or political activist) organisation rather than a scholarly team writing an encyclopedia. Wyss 15:51, 19 November 2005 (UTC)

Update: A Wiki-friend was kind enough to observe the following:
People are going to react "WtF?" or "Is he" (as everybody assumes you're he) "so thick that it's taken him a year and thousands of edits before realizing this?"
How about something like:
"Because those people who formulate and enforce Wikipedia policies show a cavalier lack of concern for academic standards in sourcing."
Yes, she said, yes. Wyss 14:56, 21 November 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedia is a Meta Culture Blog Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Wyss"

Yawn. User:Zoe|(talk) 03:42, 30 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Why the yawn? I think Wyss makes some good points. She also wrote on her talk page:
"I'd also suggest that the wanton enabling of trolls and fools on Wikipedia gives the petty cyber-castle builders endless excuses to waste time on them with RfArs, RfCs, mentor committees, IRC watchlist feeds, loopy talk page discussions/scoldings, insincere civility patrols and other process-oriented, attention-getting stuff they think will help them get elected to roles in the bureaucracy... anything to avoid true volunteer work, the writing of an encyclopedia founded on scholarly principles." Wyss 18:06, 21 November 2005 (UTC)
Why the yawn? Because all of the whining is boring. User:Zoe|(talk) 02:50, 1 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
It sounds like a good description of whats going on to me. Is wikipedia going to change with the expanded number of users or is it just going to stagnate? David D. (Talk) 16:45, 30 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
You can accuse Wikipedia of all manner things, but I don't think you could ever call it stagnant. Leithp (talk) 17:00, 30 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
It depends what you mean by stagnate. Just because there are more articles does not mean there is more knowledge. More crap will drive away knowledgable users and without knowledgable users, but with many trolls, who will be writing the quality articles? I know wiki tries not to be elitist but In the long term, as more trolls arrive, this can only get worse. I think this is what Wyss is referring to and I think she has a good point. David D. (Talk) 17:59, 30 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
"as more trolls arrive, this can only get worse". Are you sure? Does the proportion of trolls to non-trolls change as more people arrive? The basic premise is that the number of non-trolls will always far exceed the number of trolls, sufficiently much so that the overall contribution is positive. -- Rick Block (talk) 02:14, 1 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia is not a scholarly project and it will never be. If you want to read scholarly texts, read scientific magazines, or a scientific wiki. I fully appreciate the efforts of the academics here, and I am too trying to reduce the crap level, but unless we get all schools in every country to teach proper scholarly techniques, an encyclopedia that everyone can edit will always be like that. As for using Wikipedia for scholarly work: Don't. Note on troll percentage: Wikipedia is a Scale-free network, thus the percentage of academics and the percentage of no-brain-trolls will remain more or less constant no matter how much Wikipedia grows. Mkill 17:37, 3 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

WP contains a lot of academic material. It will never be an exclusively academic project, but, not being paper it doesn't need to be. No amount of Pokemon and school articles are going to degrade my academic corner of Wikipedia. What does degrade it is clueless editors who walk all over perfectly good articles. People need to learn respect of existing articles, so these are not eroded so much, this is a much more serious problem than the shitloads of fresh garbage added daily. I am not whining, and I am not leaving over this, but we should look towards fixing or restricting the "wanton enabling of trolls" and the "cavalier attitude". WP needs lots of grunt volunteers on RC patrol etc. -- these are valuable, but, frankly, replaceable. Experts are a much rarer asset, and every academic expert driven away by trolls is a loss that is not easily replaced. dab (ᛏ) 08:12, 6 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Require registration (log-in) to edit

The problem: A lot of garbage on Wikipedia is inserted into articles by anonymous editors; the overwhelming bulk of blanking, graffiti, and other vandalism is by anonymous editors. In turn, an enormous amount of time is spent by responsible (almost always registered) editors in reverting stuff: this is totally unproductive time, better spent doing something else. And if I'm typical, something worse: after a while, we don't revert or fix minor errors; as a long-time contributor here, I used to revert all that stuff, but now usually don't — there's too much of it, it's discouraging, and I have better things to do, as do we all.

Now the problem is not usually very serious: it just makes Wikipedia look silly, a very iffy source of information (I almost never link to it from my own site), and wastes a lot of everybody's time. But sometimes it becomes something much worse: the current controversy over Wikipedia's article on John Seigenthaler Sr. (q.v., and the Talk page), in which the subject of the article discovered that for several months he'd been obliquely accused of having something to do with two assassinations, is not unique: see this section of the Talk page on John Seigenthaler. Mr. Seigenthaler has gone on national media, quite successfully putting Wikipedia in the same category as wacko Internet stuff, blogs, etc.: even if we are not concerned with libelling people (and one of these days some court is going to award damages), izzis the publicity Wikipedia wants?

The solution is simple. Require registration (log‑in) before you can edit. While there are a few anonymous editors who do contribute usefully, the overwhelming majority of them do not; conversely, there is very little vandalism by registered users. (Not talking about POV issues here, which can't usually be classified as vandalism.)

Registration is easy, free, spamfree. If a registered user is so foolish as to libel someone via Wikipedia, they can be held accountable; protected by the laws governing ISP's (see the Seigenthaler Talk page again) anonymous "users" cannot. Bill 13:24, 3 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

It would be nice to see statistics on what percentage of anon contribs are vandalism. Nonetheless, requiring all users to contribute would raise the entry barrier, and not only reduce the number of vandalisms, but also reduce the number of positive edits. And remember that many users who starts as anons eventually register - but if they were never allowed to be anons in the first place and had to register for their fist edit, would they?
Nonetheless I think it may be prudent to implement a feature 'protection from anons', allowing admins to protect certain commonly vandalised pages from anon edits. It might prove to be a panacea for Bush page dillema and similar high profile 'often-vandalised-by-anons' pages..--Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus Talk 15:28, 3 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
I Support Bill's proposal, or at least something incorporating main parts of his recommendation. If the only problem was random vandalism, it could be lived with as the price of having an open wiki. But, we see in the Siegenthaler case and several others [1], really malicious and harmful behavior aimed at specific, living, individuals. I've also seen small companies [2] targeted by anonymous contributors.
Bill's proposal could be criticized from two points of view: First, it will not be positive proof against this kind of behavior, since it will remain very easy to get a practically anonymous user name; second, as Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus suggests, that it will deter new users unnecessarily. As for the second criticism, a compromise is possible along the following lines: permit anonymous users to edit most pages as they do now, but prevent them from creating new pages and from editing pages in certain categories, for example, articles about living people and existing businesses. I like this proposal, b/c it gives new users plenty of space to 'play' within WP and provides a further incentive to register while protecting against the more serious kind of defamation vandalism --FRS 16:04, 3 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

It's been brought up many times: Wikipedia:Village pump (perennial proposals)#Abolish anonymous users. --Interiot 16:05, 3 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

True, Interiot, it is a perennial proposal, but that shouldn't prevent it being discussed afresh if that is what you're suggesting. Things move on, and people can change their views (as I have on this subject). --A bit iffy 17:36, 3 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  • The major problems with this suggestion are (a) your contention that the majority of anons do not contribute usefully is clearly false, based on what I've seen looking at recent changes; (b) your suggestion doesn't do anything to combat the problem that's motivating it: users who are willing to construct elaborate libel are likely also to be willing to take the time to register. While requiring registration might stop the people who randomly add "penis" to articles, it's not going to deal with the Seigenthaler situation. Christopher Parham (talk) 16:29, 3 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
I don't like fights, but as for (a) you've inadvertently misrepresented what I said: not that the majority of anons vandalize, but that the majority of vandalism appears to be anons, which is a very different thing. As for (b), requiring registration will deter: it's not the slight time involved in registration, but the knowledge that registration requires their e-mail address, and registered users are thus trackable. This seems to be supported by the fairly clear fact that very little vandalism is by registered users. At any rate, my concern is not so much with the Seigenthaler and other similar messes, but with the day-to‑day parade of graffiti and blanking to be reverted. Bill 17:11, 3 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Well, when I registered, the email address was optional. I think it still is. Even if we require it (raising the bar for participation significantly!), getting an anonymous one-off email-address is trivial. Thus we would make participation harder for not much gain. On the other hand, I would support a "protection from anonymous", analogous to the current complete protection. Such a feature could be used by an admin if necessary. It would also allow us to get some experience with this topic.--Stephan Schulz 21:51, 3 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
The observation that all but a minute fraction of vandalism comes from users who are not logged in is hard to deny to contributors who have accumulated a substantial Watchlist. Without rephrasing it in the form of its converse, that the majority of anons do not contribute usefully— which is not in any way the issue— I agree strongly with Bill Thayer, as a thoroughly anonymous—"Wetman"—contributor myself. Asking a would-be editor to log in first is a simple extra step that would slightly raise the bar, enough to discourage spur-of-the-moment "drive-by" spray-can graffiti, though indeed not enough to thwart any "POV" assertions or the constructing elaborate schemes of any kind, libellous ormerely zany. --Wetman 17:16, 3 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
"While there are a few anonymous editors who do contribute usefully, the overwhelming majority of them do not" certainly seems to imply exactly what I said. Your claim there that the overwhelming majority of anons do not contribute usefully is false, though perhaps this isn't reflective of what you meant to say. Second, an email is not currently required to register an account, so your other point would also require some change to the user-login scheme. Christopher Parham (talk) 17:28, 3 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Most unfortunately, Bill has not presented the case carefully enough. He shouldn't have said "While there are a few anonymous...", and he did get that e-mail thing wrong. However, I believe the case for allowing only registered users to edit is strong in that it will stop almost all vandalism, which takes up a silly amount of good editors' time. (Read more of my views on this at User:A_bit_iffy#Things I really hate about Wikipedia.) --A bit iffy 18:03, 3 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Rereading self) Umm, yes, though I don't quite think it, I did get carried away towards the end of my yammering, and you guys read me better than I do. . . . On the e‑mail thing, I seem to remember having to provide an e‑mail address? Zat gone now? Anyway, my watchlist is about 65% tiny edits, spelling corrections, that kind of thing, often by robots, and almost all the rest is graffiti and blanking: possibly because by temperament I'm not interested in large topics, but track almost all factual articles on small places in Italy, minor Roman stuff, etc. It's a bit like all those soldiers who left their graffiti on the pyramids. Bill 19:09, 3 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
As far as I know, an email address was never required. You could always specify it. I suspect you misremember. --Stephan Schulz 21:05, 4 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I would support limiting new page creations to those who are logged in, perhaps even requiring them to build up a few edits first, like we already do for page moves. It's much harder to deal with bad articles than bad edits. The vast majority of new articles created by anonymous users, that I've seen, could be called "bad". However, bad doesn't mean vandalism. A lot of it is vandalism, but the articles that are CSD and AfD material unintentionally, combined with copyright violations puts the number of bad articles over good. On the other hand, I've seen a much better bad to good ratio for edits. However, this is just my experience and perception, which can be unreliable. It would be good to have some precise numbers about the problem.

Also, while the potential loss of good editors resulting from changes like this is a valid concern, there are consequences to accepting a higher level of bad articles. We may lose editors we already have when they get sick of dealing with the articles. A more significant consequence is the amount of time good editors waste deleting bad articles. How many good articles and edits are don't get made because they are busy nominating or voting them for deletion, or reporting them to copyright problems? I don't know which loss would be greater, but there are definitely consequences to doing nothing.

If we do make a change, we could limit it to a week or a month and collect information on whether it works and whether new editors are lost. -- Kjkolb 18:29, 3 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

  • I agree that we spend too much energy on deleting new pages that we don't want, but I think this should motivate some changes to our deletion policy rather than to our policy on page creation; see for instance this. Christopher Parham (talk) 18:48, 3 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
The fact that the issue of blocking anonymous IP's from editing has come up again and again shows how serious the issue is. Many Wikipedians, perhaps, would support the idea or would seriously consider it. I support the idea of blocking anon IP's. If this current discussion ends up nowhere again I expect that it will be brought up again. How many positive editors would be discouraged from editing by this policy? Well, if it is clearly specified that creating an account does not require disclosing any personal information whatsoever, I don't expect that many will be discouraged. Their User Name can even by a faux number sequence, similar to an IP address, if they like. Alexander 007 01:07, 4 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
If we assume that requiring people to make a username will deter those who would otherwise commit minor vandalism, we'd have to also assume that the extra effort will deter those who would otherwise perform minor positive edits -- spelling, punctuation, correcting dates, removing vandalism, etc., unless anyone has substantial reason to believe that destructive anons would be more deterred than constructive anons. I would expect the added demand to register an account to work both ways. Christopher Parham (talk) 02:17, 4 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
How do you feel about the compromise suggested several paragraphs above: "permit anonymous users to edit most pages as they do now, but prevent them from creating new pages and from editing pages in certain categories, for example, articles about living people and existing businesses" My issue is not minor vandalism, but making defamation and invasion of privacy of real people & companies more difficult or risky for those who would use WP for that purpose --FRS 02:23, 4 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
I don't think such a policy about new pages is necessary -- the new pages listing is fairly well patrolled (it's a lot easier to get a handle on than recent changes). Again, I wouldn't want to prevent anonymous users from editing pages in any category because the balance of their contributions is positive; the net effect of such a policy would be damage to Wikipedia. Finally, as I said above, anyone with a serious malicious intent is unlikely to be stopped by the <15 seconds it takes to make an account, so any policy about limiting the rights of anon users is very unlikely to control such serious, malicious editing. Christopher Parham (talk) 21:37, 4 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
I disagree that the new pages listing is well patrolled. Those of us who edit Islam-related articles are dealing with one user who creates ten or more articles a day, a great many of them ending up on AfD. If someone were patrolling the new pages, someone else would catch abominations like Western scholars and Reports of unusual religious childbirths. Note: I have disagreed with Christopher Parham in the past re new article creation; he seems to me to believe that just about every new article can be salvaged if enough work is put into it. This seems to me to grotesquely over-estimate the number of responsible editors and the amount of time that they can dedicate to salvaging cruft. Zora 22:35, 4 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
I only mean that new pages is well-patrolled in the sense that articles that are created as minor vandalism are usually quickly removed, so we don't need to worry much about this sort of addition. Blocking anonymous users from contributing new articles is unlikely to prevent other sorts of 'bad' new articles, whatever the definition; forcing the creation of an account is not much of a barrier. Regarding your specific concerns, it's not clear what those patrolling new pages should do about the articles you link -- clearly they can't be deleted under our existing policy; what would you suggest patrollers do about them? Christopher Parham (talk) 23:14, 4 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
I'd suggest that we need some software changes. One should be able to sort and track new pages by USER, without having to cut and paste new pages to an app on one's own computer and then sorting. We need stats on new article creation -- what's the usual number of new articles created per X edits? -- and a hard-coded limit on the number of new articles any one user can create in a week, or in a month, to be established relative to the average number of new articles. If new article creation were a finite rather than an infinite resource, editors might be more careful about creating breakout articles for one misspelled sentence. Zora 23:23, 4 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Restricting non-logged in users from editing is a throughly counterproductive idea. The reason most vandalism comes from "anons" is that the people vandalizing don't have to log in. If we required logging in, most of them would. The supporters of this seem to be regularly confused as to what the intended target of such a restriction would be: at first, they often claim it would help with libel or other major damage to the 'pedia - when it is pointed out that such a policy would make the identification, fixing and tracking of such material harder, they switch to the argument that the policy would act as a speed-bump and stop trivial, minor vandalism. When it is pointed out that such vandalism is a minor problem already, and not worth a major policy change with many downsides (less minor good fixes, a great barrier to gradually getting involved with the wiki) they often switch back to a mid-range argument, ignoring the fact that both ends of the argument have been defeated. The reason the proposal keeps coming up is the natural human desire to find scapegoats - "it must be the anons; let's kill 'em!" is a simple and obvious response to the crap-flood which we are, in fact, facing. It is also thoroughly wrong; anon's are not a separate group from logged in users; we're all people; anon's are just people who wish to be less strongly affiliated with the site at this particular time. They are not a separate class that can be blocked as such. It's a bad idea, folks, and one we have rejected many, many times. Pardon the vehemence of my above comment (late at night). JesseW, the juggling janitor 10:36, 8 December 2005 (UTC)

Other open source projects typically require providing a valid, verified e-mail address just to be part of the discussion lists; and require actual participation (sending patches that get incorporated into code) before becoming allowed to commit changes unsupervised. My wife (head of her department at a four year college) tells me that Wikipedia is being regarded by Internet savvy academics as an unreliable source, and some are requiring a second source whenever Wikipedia is used as a reference by students. I believe that we should require edits to be by Wiki users who have registed, including a verified active e-mail address.

I cannot see how requiring registration would identification or tracking of malicious or other bad material harder. Having the IP address only makes it much harder - ISPs will not respond to the question of who has an IP address on at a given point in time except to subpoenas and warrants. Having the e-mail address is great. I speak from experience, having had this as a job responsibility.

Sock puppet claims might be a thing of the past. Wrolf 04:35, 11 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Vetting new pages

What about a process in which new pages created by anonymous users are held in a special, non-publically viewable area? Pages living there would have to be approved by an admin (or perhaps by a logged-in user or something in between) before they were made visible to the world via the main namespace. Edits to existing articles would not be affected. This would still allow non-logged in users to create articles, but rob the effectiveness of their efforts: why create a Rob is soooo kool! page if you can't share it with your friends? The downside would be the amount of effort for admins to filter the pages, but that really depends on the number of admins available. Even allowing logged-in users to approve the pages would be a great help, as this would require quite a few steps for your random bored schoolkid to create a page. Conversely, if the "any logged in user" requirement is too low, and the admin requirement is too high, it could be something like "logged-in users who have existed for XXX days and/or have made at least XXX edits." Adjusting those XXXs should allow a large enough pool of willing people so that valid new-anon pages should be visible very shortly after their creation. Articles meeting CSD could be immediately removed by an admin. Turnstep 19:03, 3 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Vandalism to existing articles is a more serious problem than new articles

Creating bogus new articles is not good, but someone using wikipedia for research is highly unlikely to even notice a new article with a bogus title. Adding plausible but incorrect material to a biography of Cyrus Vance or Hillary Clinton is a much more serious problem, in terms of the inconvenience to readers, and the harm to wikipedia's reputation (IMHO). I support the proposal (to make users register "login" names on the theory that it will probably cut down vandalism a bit, at a minor cost, recognizing that it will do nothing to discourage the serious vandal. Morris 03:02, 5 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Also see existing articles vandalized more than new ones. I agree that we need to require only logged in users to contribute. Most of the vandalism I see is by ip's. But on the other hand see some by logged in users and when I check their contribs they will have only have registered quite recently (empty user and talk pages).--Dakota t e 20:56, 5 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
I think forbidding edits by anonymous users is a very bad idea. While the number of constructive edits by anonymous users may not be that big, I think that most users start anonymously. After a while they are hooked and register (I know that this is true for me). If we disallow anonymous edits, we may well cut off (or at least reduce) the flow of new Wikipedians. --Stephan Schulz 21:48, 5 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
As far as I can tell, the majority of minor fixes to articles (things like spelling, punctuation, and grammar) are done by anons. These are spur-of-the-moment edits by people who are otherwise passive readers. By requiring them to create an account before fixing the problem, we make it much less likely that they'll bother with it. --Carnildo 22:35, 5 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
I'm with Stephan - I would never have edited Wikipedia if there had been a policy against anonymous edits. At first, I didn't want to create an account because I was sure that I was just going to make this one edit... just fix this really egregious spelling error... just correct this totally off-base assertion... and so on. It took months of occasional editing before I was willing to create an account. - AdelaMae (talk - contribs) 03:13, 7 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Every time anyone publishes an article we have to go through this. Not only would blocking anonymous edits drastically inhibit our growth, but it would have little effect on vandals. They would create throwaway accounts to vandalize with. They don't create accounts now only because they don't have to - if they did, they would. If you've seen some of the vandalism I have, you know that many of these people are not casual vandals, they work hard at it, and would happily jump over any hurdles we throw at them. Any attempt to prevent throwaway accounts, such as identity validation, would lead to other undesirable effects and further discourage legitimate users. At least now we can review changes by anons separately, and it helps us to catch a lot of vandalism. Give me anonymous edits, or give me death. Deco 00:15, 6 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  • Is this now policy? As I've noticed I cannot clean up categories today. If anyone can edit, that includes new page creation. You should change the notice on the main page. TO requires registration 132.205.45.148 19:14, 6 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Policies and guidelines

Kim Bruning is proposing a major change to existing Wikipedia practice, namely removing the difference between policies and guidelines. I think it is worth taking a look at Template_talk:Guideline and Template_talk:Policy to review the proposed changes. -- SCZenz 06:16, 5 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

In fact this is not a change at all, rather undoing some instruction creep. Many people still (correctly) refer to all wikipedia rules as being guidelines. Kim Bruning 07:24, 5 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
What makes it correct, Kim? The fact that that's how it was once, and you like it? Personally, I abide by the consensus of the community, which seems to find the difference important. -- SCZenz 07:27, 5 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Hey, don't look at me! You're the dude(tte) who is currently responsible for consensus being not policy. ;-) Kim Bruning 07:53, 5 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Consensus is policy; see WP:NOT#Wikipedia is not a democracy, which is policy. The page Wikipedia:Consensus is not policy, and I suspect this is because it's mostly details of various ways to obtain a rough consensus, which we all know is controversial. I don't see a problem here. -- SCZenz 14:13, 5 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, there you go, Wikipedia:Consensus is not policy. So how about we put the correct actual text there that would be the "consensus policy" please, else it's all going to be very confusing to new people. Kim Bruning 22:17, 5 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
I thought about that overnight. The issue is that the policy part of consensus is very short: the way I'd put it is that Decisions on Wikipedia are made, as far as possible, by consensus. Do we need a policy page just for that? We could do that, and move much of the current Wikipedia:Consensus material to a Wikipedia:Rough consensus page; I don't think that's necessary, but I'm not strongly opposed. Maybe just a clearer note that the ideal of consensus is policy (with a link to the relevant part of WP:NOT), and it's only the specifics that are guidelines, at the top of the consensus page. -- SCZenz 22:22, 5 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
I thought policy had community consensus and required community consensus to change, and ought be respected in all but extreme situations, whilst guidelines may not have a full community consensus, don't have to be followed absolutely and acted as fall back positions in unresolvable disputes. Ignoring a guideline is being bold, ignoring policy is potentially disruptive, no? Steve block talk 20:42, 5 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
No. On two counts: For one it's posible to ignore practically everything and still be ok, and for two rules pages are labeled practically at random, it seems Kim Bruning 22:17, 5 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Which pages are labeled the wrong thing? All the ones I've seen make sense to me, with the possible exception of the consensus page as discussed above. -- SCZenz 22:22, 5 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
One example would be Wikipedia:Naming conventions (categories), most of which was put together by a fairly small group of users on the talk page and is felt virtually only on CFD. I'd be surprised if the majority of editors even know this page exists, let alone if it has "wide acceptance among editors." In any case, it's clearly not fundamental in the same way WP:NPOV is. Christopher Parham (talk) 03:26, 6 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
As a general matter, I do think there's a useful distinction between policy and guidelines, but I think it's drawn in the wrong place right now; for people reading the policy pages, what's useful is to distinguish "fundamental pages I should definitely understand" from "ad hoc pages to be consulted as needed." New users should understand WP:GFDL, WP:NPOV and WP:V. These are fundamental prescriptive policies (foundation issues), and it is useful to distinguish them from the bulk of the project space that contains descriptive guidelines and policies. Christopher Parham (talk) 03:34, 6 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  • I think that policies and guidelines and and should be distinct. There may well be particular pages that are mis-labled, and should be marked as policy when they are not currently so marked. if so, they can and should be corrected. But an attempt to simply abolish the distinction by redircting the policy template, without significant debate, is IMO very kuch the wrong way to do this. I understand that originally they two terms had the same meanign on wikipedia, but that hasn't been truew is quite soem time. i also understand that because of this some old pages that are generally treated as policy have not been so labled. That can and should be corrected. if soemone wants to propose that there not be a distinction between "policy" and "guideline" that should be made a s a proposal to cvhange existing policy, and should need to gain consensus just as any proposal for change does. I personally would oppose any such proposal, or at least that is my present view -- I would of course consider arguemtns to the contrary that might be put forward. DES (talk) 20:41, 7 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

about copying

hi can i copy a small portion of an article as long as i put/acknowledge Wikipedia in my sources/bibliography? -thanks. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 202.138.180.35 (talk • contribs)

Wikipedia:Copyrights - see for example Wikipedia:Copyrights#Example notice --Francis Schonken 10:09, 5 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
See also Wikipedia:Citing Wikipedia. TenOfAllTrades(talk) 20:52, 7 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Sub-article notation

Striver has been creating a great many new articles (as those of you who have listened to me kvetch undoubtedly know <g>). Until recently, he has been linking those articles to existing articles either in the text of the existing article (See XXX for further discussion) or adding links in the "See also" section. Recently, he has adopted another tactic. He inserts a notice at the START of an article saying that "This article is a sub-article of XXX". For examples, see:

Those are just a FEW of the articles he created or modified today using his Striver-defined hierarchical schema. (He's made 98 edits on December 5, by my count, and I'm not sure how many of those are new articles.)

I don't think one user should arrogate to himself the right to set up a hierarchy of articles without any discussion. Links and "see also" don't set up a hierarchy. Sub-article does. Please comment. Zora 09:30, 5 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Ideas on how to handle this can be found in places like:
Don't know if this helps, but I suppose this is somehow the "broader picture" re. the topic you bring to the attention of the community. --Francis Schonken 09:39, 5 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Oops, still forgot to mention: Wikipedia:NPOV tutorial#Article splitting --Francis Schonken 09:57, 5 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Hi everyone. Im the guy Zora haves issues with. Regarding me renaming "Ulema", ill take that upp in the articles talk page.

I would be intrested to hear about some feedback regarding the idea of arraging article in a hierarchical. I asked for some comments here, but didnt get any.

The basic idea is that most articles can be put in a hirarcy. Of course this could lead to some border cases that could be difficult to agree on, but the great benefits i see in being able to see the articles in the context of more detailed sub-articles and less detailed parent articles outwheights the few border case difficulties this can lead to. It also makes it easier to find related topics and having a sense of where in the jungle of articles one is at the curent monent. Also, this takes further advantig of Wikipedia not a paper encyclopedia.


Being a computer scienctis in the field of Computer software I took my inspiration from Object based programming and Inheritance (computer science).

I tweak't it a bit and came to a model suitable for Wikipedia. In Object Based Programming, Comunism could inherit from politics and Marxism.

Definition

In a Wikimodel of it, i divided articels to:

  1. sub/parent articles.
  2. parallel articles.
  3. related articles.
  4. none related articles.

Sub-articles mention in the beginning of the aritlce what their "direct parent" is, and possibly also what their "parallel parent" or simple "parallel" article is.

Related articles are not mentioned in the beginning of the article, just mentined in the "see also" section.

"None related articles" are simply hypelinked to in the article text.

Examples

For example, Democracy and Comunism are both related articles, both being political models. Both are mentioned in the "see also" section of the other article. Alternativly, they could both be put in political models, and link to it as a parent-article.


Both Democracy and Comunism are sub-articles to politics. Democracy is a "parallel sub-article" to Majoritarianism, while Comunism is a "parallel sub-article" to Marxism.

"Majoritarianism" and "Marxism" are ideologies, while Democracy and Comunism are Form of governments, and "Form of governments" are not sub-sets to "ideologies". "Form of government" is in turn a sub-article to politics. Other sub-articles to "politics" include Economics (household managemen) and posibly Law.

Law enforcement being a "sub-article" to enforcement and a "parallel sub-article" to "Law", since "Law enforcement" is "enforcement" rather than "law". There are laws that are not "enforced" and "enforcement" is not a sub-set of "Law", one could "enforce" a unlawfull act, Chaos enforcement, that being a related article to "Law enforcment", and a "sub-article" to "enforcment"] and a "parallel sub-article" to "Chaos".

Of course there is no such words as "Chaos Enforcement", but the fact that the hirarcy leaded to that word shows how effective it is in categorisation. By tha way, "Chaos Enforcement" gave 23 google hits :P


"Politics" coul in turn be a sub-article to Distribution and a "parallel sub-article" to power.

History of democracy is a "sub-article" to history and a "parallel sub-article" to "democracy", since "History" is not a sub-set to "Form of government".

Comunist party is a sub-article to Politcial party and a "parallel sub-article" "Comunism".

I assured that 95% of the articles have one or several natural parent articles.

Experiment

As a experiment, i created implemented it in Islamic scholars and its parallel article Islamic studies. I actually develped the idea as i worked with the articles, and now i have a finished and presentable proposal. Take a look at those two, and see how deep the sub-articles go, as deep as Islamic Banking and Wilayat al-Faqih, both tracable back to Islamic studies. I was very, very pleased with the solution, and the system made a very good job at showing what articles where missing and i needed to create to expand the hirarcy. For example, i discovered that there was no "Wilayat al-Faqih" while doing Islamic leadership.


Feedback

i eagerly await feedback! Peace! --Striver 16:58, 5 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I'll hold off on commenting on the actual structure you've set up for the time being. Instead, I'd like to take issue with one of your assumptions.
A "natural" hierarchy may be feasible for concept articles, but the vast majority of Wikipedia articles are about isolated "things"—people, events, objects. How do we define a meaningful hierarchy to include, say, Gian Giacomo Trivulzio? He's part of several sets, which are identified by the categories on the article; but is there really a parent article for him? —Kirill Lokshin 17:48, 5 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for your respons! With regards to persons, if they have a prominent job, like George W. Bush, i would do this:
This is a sub article to American presidents.
He will be for ever remebered as the president of USA, so IMHO, "American presidents" is the natural parent article. Since "American presidents" is a sub-article to American leaders and American politicians, and both of them being sub-articles of Americans, there is no need of having "George W. Bush" being a sub-article of both "American presidents" and "Americans". however, if a non-American could be "American presidents", then both "American presidents" and "Americans" whould be parents of "George W. Bush". Oh, acctualy, he was also in the Army, so maybe he should be a sub-article to both "American presidents" and American soldiers:
This is a sub article to American presidents and American soldiers.
He is also a neo-con, so maybe:
This is a sub article to American presidents, American Neo-Cons and American soldiers.
Acctualy, he was a failure as far as soldier goes, so that is upp to disscusion. If this was my personal Wiki, i would have it as...
This is a sub article to American and a parallel sub-article to Puppet.
...But that is not going to happen :P
Regarding Gian Giacomo. His article contains:
Gian Giacomo Trivulzio (1441-1518) was a Milanese aristocrat who held several military commands during the Italian Wars. Initially in the service of Lodovico Sforza, in 1483 he switched his allegiance to Charles VIII of France. Appointed by Louis XII as governor of Milan, he took part in the Battle of Agnadello, and commanded contingents of the French army at Novara and Marignano.
So we know:
  • He was a Italian.
  • He was a soldier, a commander
  • He served both Italy and France.
  • He was a governor
As far as Italian, that is established. My first thought was to rule out "Italian" in favour of Italian soldier, but him changing allegiance ruins that.... One alternative would be:
This is a sub article to Italian governors, Italian soldier and France Soldier.
I dont know if "Traitor" is pov or not, according to the article it says:
In law, treason is the crime of disloyalty to one's nation. A person who betrays the nation of their citizenship and/or reneges on an oath of loyalty and in some way willfully cooperates with an enemy, is considered to be a traitor.
So, include "Traitor" if it is NPOV, then also add "Italian soldier" or "Italian commander", depending on his rank, "France soldier" or "France commander", depending on his rank, and "Italian governor". Whoever, many of those articles are not created. This would give a reason to create them, and make it easier to locate all the Italian soldier in a List of Italian soldiers. in cronological order, that whould make:
This is a sub article to Italian commanders, Italian traitors, France commanders and Italian governors
I dont know if the sub-articles should be arranged according to cronology or notability. If you dont like all the read links, you could do it this way:
This is a sub-article to Italian, Commander, Governor and Traitor.


Regarding events, it can be included in a history article. WWII:
This is a sub-article to World war and a parallel sub-article to History of war.


Pearl harbor:
This is a sub-article to America in WWII Japan in WWII.


Vietnamn:
This is a sub-article to America warfare and Vietnamesis warfare.
America warfare:
This is a sub-article to World warfare parallel sub-article to Warfare.


Apple:
This is a sub-article to Fruits.


Thax again for your feedback. Comments? --Striver 20:32, 5 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

As I understand it, computer scientists are trying to get away from the old hierarchical file systems, and adopt newer models that allow multiple classifications of files. Wikipedia, in adopting a multiple classification model, is bleeding edge, not retro. Adopting a hierarchical system also enormously expands the realm of possible controversy. What's the best category for Ariel Sharon? General? Leader? Terrorist? Not only is Striver's idea a bad idea, it was a bad idea to have implemented his bad idea without ever discussing it with anyone. Zora 22:20, 5 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
I don't see the advantage of what you're proposing. It seems like everything you're doing is already present in the opening sentence, the categories, and the see-also section. Your way may or may not be superior, but it's different from what the rest of the WP community is doing. In the past, Wikipedia did do something like this, using sub-pages, but that method was abandoned. The right way to go about changing the way things are done is to try to build consensus first. While boldness is suitable for article editing, it's not as good for changing the way the entire project is structured. We need consistency in things like this. —Wahoofive (talk) 22:31, 5 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
This looks like a really good way of avoiding the hard work of actually creating comprehensive, neutral, well-written encyclopedic content, and instead easily fill Wikipedia with a whole bunch of hierarchical lists which, after a lot of clicking, eventually lead you to stub articles. Striver, my advice to you would be to pick a page, make that page the best page it can be, repeat. —Bunchofgrapes (talk) 23:12, 5 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
I don't like the hierarchy idea. Where it applies, for example with sorting algorithms, we usually have both a main article with details and a list, and a category. The intro paragraph of each sorting algorithm links up to sorting algorithm. Categories are already hierarchical - and there is a category for American presidents. The sheer number of categories applied to your average article should be evidence enough that single-classification is nearly always inadequate. Deco 00:08, 6 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Oh, one more comment: if you browse around a bit at Mathworld, I'm sure you can see some of the annoying compromises forced by single classification. Sometimes there is no really good place in the hierarchy for something, and other times something really belongs in 2 or more places. I can already imagine edit wars about where some article really "belongs". Let's stay with multiple classification and also try to avoid adding additional clutter to the article intro. Deco 00:11, 6 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  • Please don't do this without acquiring consensus first. I think it's a bad idea, and also feel that it's being too bold. --Improv 01:08, 6 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]


Answering feedback - No single inheritance

Zora wrote:

As I understand it, computer scientists are trying to get away from the old hierarchical file systems, and adopt newer models that allow multiple classifications of files. Wikipedia, in adopting a multiple classification model, is bleeding edge, not retro.

Zora, what you are taliking about is "mulitple inheritance", something that was available already in C++. In it, you could have "Pegasus" inherit both "bird" and "Horse", getting both wings and hoves.

It looks like this:

class Pegasus : public horse, public Bird
{
void Chirp() const { Whinny(); } //replacing "Chirp" with "Whinny"
}

I have no idea of what maid you think that i was proposing a single inheritance model, just look at what i sugested:

This is a sub-article to Italian, Commander, Governor and Traitor.

That one example inherites 4 (four) diferent parent articles, many of my examples gives multiple parent articles. By "parallel sub-articles" i meant things like a "Jesus" inheriting "pacifism", it cant be done logicly since "pacifism" is a ideology, not a human, less a physical object. That is the only reason i argued to use "parallel sub-articles". Otherwise even the "parallel" part can be droped.

Zora wrote:

Adopting a hierarchical system also enormously expands the realm of possible controversy. What's the best category for Ariel Sharon? General? Leader? Terrorist?

Use W:NPOV. Is it NPOV to call him a leader? If yes, make it a sub-article to it. Repeat with "Israeli", "General" and "terrorist". My guess is that "terrorist" does not cutt NPOV.

Not only is Striver's idea a bad idea, it was a bad idea to have implemented his bad idea without ever discussing it with anyone. Zora 22:20, 5 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I didnt plan on doing it to give everyone a nasty surprice, it was the intuitice result of trying to making sense of the mess that existed in the "Islamic scholar", "Islamic studies" and related article, until i figured out how to make it work.

Wahoofive wrote:

I don't see the advantage of what you're proposing. It seems like everything you're doing is already present in the opening sentence, the categories, and the see-also section.

The advantage is in greater overview. Due to this, you can see a logical trace, like this:

Islamic studies

Islamic comparative religion
Islamic Christianity studies
Islamic view of the Bible
Islam in the Bible

This line is logical to follow, and gives a great sense of "where" you are in what we have otherwise: a jungle of random articles.

If you are searching for the information that is related to Islamic view of Christianity, and want to know if there is some related article to the Judaism view, you can simply clim the the hirarcy and look around, instead do wandering wheater the article exists, what it can be named and so on...

Try it! Go in to Islamic studies and see how great the feeling of having a good overview is! You can appreciated it without testing it!

Wahoofive wrote:

Your way may or may not be superior, but it's different from what the rest of the WP community is doing. In the past, Wikipedia did do something like this, using sub-pages, but that method was abandoned. The right way to go about changing the way things are done is to try to build consensus first.

You are right, i hope to be able to share my experience with you. I doubt the previous method was like the one i propose, flexibility or neutrality is not an issue with this model, it only have advanteges. Yes true, you can come to roughly the same thing with the way we have now, but you will never get the same sense of overview without this proposal.


Bunchofgrapes wrote:

This looks like a really good way of avoiding the hard work of actually creating comprehensive, neutral, well-written encyclopedic content, and instead easily fill Wikipedia with a whole bunch of hierarchical lists which, after a lot of clicking, eventually lead you to stub articles. Striver, my advice to you would be to pick a page, make that page the best page it can be, repeat.

Brother, those things are not exclusive of eachoter. You can have both a great articel in a great categorised structure. About stubs, Wikipedia does have them for a reason. If there are lots of stubs created, that means that there are a need to fill them with information, Stubs are good, not bad :)

Deco wrote

I don't like the hierarchy idea. Where it applies, for example with sorting algorithms, we usually have both a main article with details and a list, and a category. The intro paragraph of each sorting algorithm links up to sorting algorithm.

And that is exactly what im talikng about! Linking up sub-articles to the parents!

Categories are already hierarchical - and there is a category for American presidents. The sheer number of categories applied to your average article should be evidence enough that single-classification is nearly always inadequate.

Categories are great, and this is a in-between that makes it easier to get a quik overview.

You dont need to Link the "Islam" article to all its sub-articles, only to

  1. "Islamic studies"
  2. "Muslims"
  3. "Islamic denominations".

Everything will be included in somewhere in in those three things, famous Muslims will go, for example

  • "Islam/Muslims/Muslim leaders/Caliphs/Abu Bakr"

or

  • "Islam/Muslims/Sahaba/Zaid ibn Haritha".

Of course, "Caliphs" not only a sub-article to "Muslim leaders" but also to, for example, "Famous leaders".

I mean look at this Islam#See_also, its a mess, it have no order what so ever. The See also of Islam now contains:


List of Islamic and Muslim-related topics

That is totaly random! It is much better to replace that with:

==Sub-articles==

And if anyone want to see about Christianity, the can just go to the parent article of Islam, "Relgion" and from there go to where they want. Isnt that much cleaere than the chaos that we have in many articles? Look at Christianity#See_also:

History and denominations:


Total anarchy! that could be replace with:


== Sub-articles == * [[Christians]] * [[Christian studies]] * [[Christian denominations]]

The choise is obvious IMHO :)

I mean, think if you are looking for "Christian views of men" and dont find it in the "see also", what to do? Make a search? In the proposed system, you just go to "Christian studies" and follow the subarticles, for example

  • Christianity/Christian studies/Christian philosophy/Christian view of Humans/Christian view of Men

Cant find it? Then you'll know that its not there, instead of it having some name you couldent gues or seach for :)

Deco wrote

Oh, one more comment: if you browse around a bit at Mathworld, I'm sure you can see some of the annoying compromises forced by single classification. Sometimes there is no really good place in the hierarchy for something, and other times something really belongs in 2 or more places. I can already imagine edit wars about where some article really "belongs". Let's stay with multiple classification and also try to avoid adding additional clutter to the article intro.

And that is what i propose, multiple classification, and also being explicit and ordered about it :)

Rembeber, things have multible classification, so you can follow "Islamic banking" in any of this ways:

  • Religion/Islam/Islamic studies/Islamic Jursiprudence/Islamic economy/Islamic banking
  • Businesses/Financial services/Banking/Islamic banking


Hoping for more feedback!

--Striver 04:28, 6 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Please comment

I also saw Dominion Theology describing what i proposed!

What harm does it to sub-set in one or more catgories? Its not like we must do it everywhere... What do you think, can i continue doing it? (Zora, im not asking you)--Striver 02:38, 9 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]


new policy against anonymous users creating articles

Who the hell came up with this ridiculous idea? This was done with no consensus at all! I swear that this just came out of thin air. What happened to "assume good faith" anyway? I strongly oppose to this change. I doubt that this will stop the nonsense articles. People will just replace existing articles with nonsense even more. And if people are really determined to create nonsense articles, having this new ugly restriction won't do anything to stop them. --Ixfd64 22:57, 5 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I agree, but Jimbo has assured everyone that it is only a test. If it doesn't work, or it meets with disapproval, it will go away. We'll see, I guess.--Sean|Black 23:00, 5 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
I also strongly object to his policy. I regularly patrol new articles and find that no more than half are vandalism. The rest are valuable suggestions for legitimate topics that we may never have come up with on our own. That said, perhaps 50% of new pages is a lot of pages for admins to delete, as few as there are of them, and ideally newbies should be starting out by minor editing and getting feedback on that, not creating brand new articles. I guess there are legitimate arguments on both sides. Deco 00:04, 6 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Hear, hear! What makes Jimbo think that enough anons are not physically able to create well-crafted meaningful articles that it requires a full out ban, blocking out good anon article creators? And what makes him think that its worth throwing out the baby with the bathwater? So I take it National Pact shouldn't have even been started then, since we're now judging people by their IP addresses and user names now. --Bash 00:16, 6 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  • For what it's worth, I approved of this idea before I even heard Jimbo was considering it. I didn't think it was politically feasable, but always felt it would be a good idea. If Jimbo is going to force the community to swallow some bitter but good medicine, I'm all for it. --Improv 01:10, 6 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  • I'll throw my voice in with those opposing; there's no reason for this policy. We are simply not being overwhelmed by the bad new pages created by anons, and if we were overwhelmed, the way to solve that is to improve our ability to sort and delete bad new articles, not to toss a blanket over an entire arbitrary class of new articles, both good and bad. There are many suggestions for new RC and NP patrol software that could improve the responsiveness of our vandal fighters without inhibiting constructive additions at all. Christopher Parham (talk) 03:37, 6 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Where on Wikipedia was this policy change announced? Do we have to hear about major changes like this from the news? User:Zoe|(talk) 03:47, 6 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

It seems we either hear it from the news, or the news hears it from us, and gets an even more distorted version of it. Jimbo doesn't really have a way to share it with the site without sharing it with the world. —Bunchofgrapes (talk) 03:50, 6 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  • Maybe we should view Jimbo's action as an experimental stimulus (see this email). It is a fairly meaningless policy change, but it may force the Wikipedia community to take stock of existing problems and make some other more important and needed changes. --JWSchmidt 04:08, 6 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  • I noticed that talk pages can still be created by anons... As for requiring accounts, I'd probbaly discontinute contributions instead. The only reason I might have registered would be to access page moves, but it's not that big a deal. To require registration, won't stop determined vandals. Since I contribute on impulse, I won't contribute further, because it impedes my altruistic impulses. I can just read google news instead. 132.205.45.148 19:21, 6 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  • If anon users don't want to get accounts, that's their loss, not ours.--Alhutch 19:28, 6 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
    • I think you've got it backwards... anonymous users make many good contributions. Kappa 19:42, 6 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
      • Now that you mention it, that was sort of a dumb thing that i wrote earlier. I wasn't thinking correctly. What i meant was that if an anon user really wants to create an article, they can just get an account and create the article. There's nothing preventing them from getting an account. It takes like 2 seconds and its free. If you want to write a new article, get an account. seems simple to me.--Alhutch 19:49, 6 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
      • And i do agree with you Kappa that anonymous users make good contributions.--Alhutch 19:50, 6 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Could an advocate of the position that users identified by IP addresses alone should be allowed to create pages cite some really good pages recently added by such users? patsw 19:56, 6 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

  • Looking at the Special:Newpages from a few days back, practically all of the anon additions (and there are a fair number) are constructive. An article is always better than no article, even when it's not great. Some are better than others, of course, e.g. Youth Leagues and Noah Brooks, both reasonably high quality articles that were created totally by anons, including references from the first edit. Christopher Parham (talk) 20:04, 6 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Filtered out of this, of course, are the many, many articles that were speedy-deleted shortly after being created. Anyone who has spent much time watching Special:Newpages can tell you that a large portion of the pages created are candidates for deletion. Check Special:Log/delete to get some idea. This deletion takes administrator time. CDC (talk) 22:28, 6 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Naturally....the point was to provide examples of quality pages submitted by anons. Christopher Parham (talk) 23:10, 6 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  • I would like to state my objection to the new policy. If there's a discussion of this policy other than here, I'd appreciate it if someone could point it out to me--I do not do IRC, generally, so I missed this entirely. My first edit to Wikipedia was the creation of an article, Balachandra Rajan, because I noticed there wasn't one and thought there should be. It was easy, I got interested, and became a registered user. I suspect this is not all that uncommon. I would not have registered if I hadn't already realized how easy it was to create pages. Chick Bowen 22:53, 6 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I strongly support the new policy. Here's the reasons why from a previous discussion: I would support limiting new page creations to those who are logged in, perhaps even requiring them to build up a few edits first, like we already do for page moves. It's much harder to deal with bad articles than bad edits. The vast majority of new articles created by anonymous users, that I've seen, could be called "bad". However, bad doesn't mean vandalism. A lot of it is vandalism, but the articles that are CSD and AfD material unintentionally, combined with copyright violations puts the number of bad articles over good. On the other hand, I've seen a much better bad to good ratio for edits. However, this is just my experience and perception, which can be unreliable. It would be good to have some precise numbers about the problem.

Also, while the potential loss of good editors resulting from changes like this is a valid concern, there are consequences to accepting a higher level of bad articles. We may lose editors we already have when they get sick of dealing with the articles. A more significant consequence is the amount of time good editors waste deleting bad articles. How many good articles and edits are don't get made because they are busy nominating or voting them for deletion, or reporting them to copyright problems? I don't know which loss would be greater, but there are definitely consequences to doing nothing.

If we do make a change, we could limit it to a week or a month and collect information on whether it works and whether new editors are lost. -- Kjkolb 23:56, 6 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

  • I am opposed to this policy change. It is my view that this will only make the job of new-page patrollers harder, because a page created by an IP user used to get extra scrutiny as a rule -- now pages by newly created users will not get that. (If Special:newpages could show the number of contributions of the contributor, that would help.) I also think thas will reduce the rate at which useful new volunteers enter the project, while doing little to slow vandalism. i also note that this makes it imposible for non-logged-in users to nominatge pages for deletion via WP:AFD since one must create a new (sub-)page as part of teh AfD process. The rules have always been than an anon user was allowed to make AfD nominations, this has effectively changed that rule as a byproduct. if this change is kept, pages in the AFD-space (or perhaps in the entire wikipedia spce) should not have this restriction applied, just as pages in the talk: space now are not restricted. DES (talk) 21:00, 7 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Agreed with DES. I think this is a poor implementation of a reasonable idea -- helping new contributors learn how to edit before cluttering up article-space (say, by following a redlink or hacking their first url). We should NOT change the current minimum time to contribution, which is one of WP's greatest strengths. If I'm on a strange computer, and need to add info about a new topic, I should still be able to do it in 15s, not 150s -- creating a new account from scratch takes a good minute, as you have to find your way back to where you were before to keep editing.
Saying "sorry, we've prevented you from doing X" is a very negative way to start someone's experience of a site.
Instead, we could transparently redirect such edits to a section on "Articles for Creation", and thank the user afterwards, encouraging them to log in to create new articles directly in-place [and offering them links to good WP-introductions to get them properly hooked]. Now that would rock. +sj + 21:06, 7 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I support the experimental policy change. And it should be clear to anyone who's read a newspaper—it turned up on my print copy of the Boston Globe yesterday—or performed a Google News search on "Wikipedia" lately--who made the experimental policy change and why. The scary part is that the reporters who wrote the news articles, and the public who reads them, probably don't understand just how little this policy does to prevent gross problems like the Seigenthaler issue. But it does something, and we'd better do something. The better Wikipedia gets, the more people trust it; the more people trust it, the angrier they are going to get at gross inaccuracies in it. Saying "you can fix it yourself" and "it's a work in progress" and "we never said you could trust it" are not going to be an acceptable answers forever. Dpbsmith (talk) 21:40, 7 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

But they sure are acceptable for now. We are a work in progress. Any thinking that we're close to being in publishing quality is strongly misguided. We need hundreds of thousands of articles that far exceed our current FA standards to do that. We are a work in progress, which doesn't make us useless. People can use us to find links to primary and secondary sources and get informed there. We also give a good basic idea of great many subjects. But anyone using an often tertiary source like Wikipedia to check facts should be either told not to believe everything they read on the internet, or told to do their homework or job properly, as in the hillarious case of NYT reporters who need to be told not to use Wikipedia as a source for writing stories [3]). Shouldn't we be using them as a source, rather that the other way around?
We should stick to our guns and ignore what media says. Zocky 22:03, 7 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
I strongly support measures, even experimental or draconian measures, to curb the creation of hoax articles, vandalism of existing articles, and I strongly feel (on the basis of my own WP experience) that wikicruft poses a critical problem which urgently requires amelioration. I have no illusion that hoaxes or vandalism of WP can be eliminated entirely, but this is not the point. My point is that experience--- at least, my experience--- suggests that wikicruft is displacing high quality content. (In fact, even displacing content plus stubs.) I believe that as a community we urgently need to recognize this, and to take steps to curb the growth of the problem, which should enable us to catch our breath and consider how to eliminate the huge amount of vapid nonsense, crackpottery, vanitycruft, and even carefully crafted hoaxes which has already crept in.
Some months ago I spent a Sunday carrying out an informal survey in which I attempted to vote on every AfD (I could only vote on perhaps 10%, as it turned out) and also tried to monitor the listed articles with the list of recent edits. I concluded that the majority of new articles on that day were obvious hoax articles, or obvious vanity articles, or otherwise obviously crufty articles. In addition, in the categories I watch closely (math and physics), something like 1-2% of new articles are cranky or less obvious hoax articles.
As another illustration of the magnitude of the problem, I have also been tracking Albert Einstein for months. This is one of the most visited physics-related articles in WP, to judge from the fact that it is vandalized several times per day. Yes, most of this vandalism is reverted, but is not the point. Check the history page of this article, note the timestamps, and do the math. Despite the allegation that an army of honest folk quickly revert vandalism to such articles, by my estimate a random user has a chance of finding this article in a vandalized state at any given moment which I find unacceptable (higher than say one chance in a thousand). Yes, this article is vandalized much more often than some little known stub, but again this would miss the point. Random users, schoolchildren, etc., who visit WP to learn about a topic are much more likely to visit the most popular articles, but unfortunately, popular articles are more often vandalized. Surely this has something to do with why (according a recent and highly informal CNN internet poll) 66% of those voting believe WP is unreliable. (Too bad, incidently, that Wikimedia presumably lacks the funds for a properly designed Harris Poll or something like that.)
In addition, the community should recognize that it is a huge waste of the valuable time of users of good faith to force them to either spend the time required to revert with sufficient care so frequently, or else to let a core article (in my fields of interest, anyway) become corrupted by vandalism of various kinds. IMO, users like myself should be free to create new content, rather than spending all our time in bootless attempts to protect the articles we have already written or rewritten from vandalism or other degradation (e.g. the insertion of irrelevant political rants by certain registed users, which I think has been another recurrent problem with Albert Einstein, even when I happen to agree with the political opinions expressed!).
Deco, I notice that we agree that about "half" of all WP edits seem to constitute vandalism, but clearly we disagree about whether half is too much. Also, I guess you would agree that rather more than half of anon edits constitute vandalism, hoaxes, or other edits which (we would probably agree) are destructive to the stated purpose/goals of WP. Yes, I do sometimes see legitimate edits by anons to the pages I watch, but by my count, the ratio is roughly 5% legitimate to 95% illegitimate edits for anons.)
These are only a few reasons why, based upon my own experience trying to create and maintain high quality articles (in math/physics), I am much more pessimistic than some others who have spoken up about how bad the cruft problem already is, and how important it is to curb anonymous edits. When I see comments like those above from Deco and C. Parham, I think they must be living in some alternate reality (rather, unreality), but perhaps they are simply watching a very different set of pages from the ones I am watching. I would like to see Jimbo &c. acknowledge (by policy changes, not just discussion) that some pages (such as Albert Einstein) need more protection than others.
I also feel that the rapid growth of WP has overwhelmed the current admin system, which simply has not scaled with sufficient grace to address the problem of administering such a huge and complex enterprise. In particular, I have doubts whether the current system supports experimental policy changes, because I have doubts whether there is an adequate system in place to track statistics and otherwise make a proper rational assessment of whether an given experimental policy change seems to be working well.
Banning all edits by anons is only one baby step toward ameliorating the wikicruft problem, but I strongly believe that this is an essential first step. I have the impression that the WP board is extremely reluctant to acknowledge certain regretable hard truths about human nature (or at least, the nature of some humans), but I strongly believe that it is only a matter of time before they will have take this step, however reluctantly. My point is that putting it off will only increase the pain, because WP will have been that much more degraded by the time Wikimedia gets serious about protecting high quality articles which have already been written (which in my view is the best way to encourage the creation of more high quality articles). Much better to do it now and allow those who fear it will somehow ruin the WP experience to learn better, while there is still sufficient ratio of signal/noise at WP to make it worth saving.
I would like to see (or learn of the prior existence of!) a convenient forum where registered users can discuss all these policy issues (and more) with a reasonable chance of being heard by those who are in a position to make changes.
But leaving aside the question of what policy issues still need to be addressed by further (perhaps provisional) policy changes, I have two immediate concerns about this particular new policy which echo points raised by others, including several who strongly disagree with me about the extent or seriousness of the wikicruft problem:
  • why did I learn about this new policy from a friend who read about it on CNN, rather than from the Wikipedia welcome page? Shouldn't major policy changes be announced in a prominent place at WP? Sean said "Jimbo has assured everyone..." --- Sean, where did you see this assurance, pray tell?! I have been editing WP for months, so I am surely no novice, yet I after several minutes I couldn't find the official announcement which presumably exists somewhere on WP!
  • Banning all edits by unregistered users is neccessary, but the new policy falls far short of even this tiny first baby step toward saving the WP from the rapid growth of wikicruft. The new policty strikes me as a pulsillanimous attempt to curb the creation of new hoax articles by anons, but its does nothing to begin to address the broader wikicruft problem, which I believe is already even more serious (and is rapidly growing even worse).
Where are such WP policy issues publically discussed? (Assuming they are publically discussed.) This page is too inconvenient a forum for user input, IMO.
By the way, Sj, can you please explain just why you would be logged onto "a strange computer" and have the need or ability to create a user account on such a machine? I hope you can provide some innocuous explanation; otherwise, some of us are apt to conclude that this comment speaks volumes about the moral standards of at least some users who badly desire to continue to edit the WP anonymously!
To end on a slightly more positive note: I presume that this change means that the WP board is at least discussing the issue of wikicruft and what to do about it, and if so I am glad to know that hoaxing and other wikicruft is at least on the radar screen. I hope the board will remember a bit of traditional WP advice to newbies: go ahead, make changes, be bold!---CH 01:05, 8 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
CH, I for one appreciate what you are saying: losing time with people who are not here to help is a problem. But you seem to be missing an important issue – all we know for certain is that allowing anons to edit is a part of the process that works. We don't know whether it's essential, but we do know that similar projects that tried to get quality through limitation of access rather than through sheer numbers of editors have failed. Zocky 02:54, 8 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Well, if we start thinking like that we might well wind up saying that WP is a utopian social experiment and therefore is doomed to ultimately fail, simply because all previous utopian social experiments have ultimately failed. In fact, I have often parroted this slogan myself, and mostly believe what I squawk, although I try not to think about it :-/ So perhaps we are simply discussing which mode of pstittacide we prefer :-/ But seriously, I would like to postpone the inevitable (assuming WP be not the exception which proves the rule). Others who are not as pessimistic about the long term future of WP as I might still agree that realizing the goal of providing the world with a free, on-line, universal, and high-quality encyclopedia is incompatible with permitting the rapid growth of hoaxes, vanity articles, blatant factual inaccuracies, crackpottery and other cruft in the Wikipedia.
Just to be clear: from time to time I have been pleasantly surprised to see some helpful anon correct my often careless spelling in some article I have labored over, and I am sincerely grateful to those editors. So the claim that some anonymous edits are helpful is not in dispute, at least not by me. I do not even dispute that from time to time anons have started legitimate articles which have sometimes grown into good articles.
But as I see it, we are discussing making judicious tradeoffs, in which we may choose to give up the genuine benefits from good anon edits in order to protetct the WP from further degradation by bad anon edits. And my belief, or rather my wild surmise, is that the best way of ensuring the rapid creation of more high qualtity WP articles is in fact to demonstrate that we care about the articles and categories we already have, at least enough to preserve them from careless or intentional destruction.
As I see it, dealing with anons is only one facet of protecting the good material already in WP and promoting the goal of reversing the figures in that CNN poll which claims that about 2/3 of respondents believe that WP is not reliable. (I venture to guess that surveying journalists would show that 90% think WP is not reliable, but that many or most of them would probably anonymously :-/ admit to using WP as a source, which raises the issue of what I see as our broader social responsibility, as citizens of the world, to clean out our cruft.)
For example, on several occasions since I came to WP, I have watched with dismay as articles reach a state of which WP can be proud, but then are gradually dismantled by careless edits, sometimes from well-intentioned registered users who are too hasty or inexperienced to take care not to shove in new material any old place, but rather to to try find some place where it fits neatly, or barring that, rewriting nearby paragraphs in order to correct any damage done to the previous flow of ideas. A dangerously naive WP myth holds that (apparently by some previously unknown law of nature) articles can only improve monotonically in quality. As I see it, this is rather like saying that we need not worry about energy resources because the laws of thermodynamics are too depressing to take seriously! I suspect that the typical evolution of a WP article is more analogous to statistical-mechanical fluctuations in discussions of Zermelo's objection to Boltzmann's so-called H-theorem than to the proverbial free lunch. In social experiments, as in physics, if a claim seems to good to be true, it probably is.
But while by no means all bad or otherwise problematic edits are made by anons, it is nonetheless true that anons are as a group responsible for far more than their fair share of bad edits. And the table presented by Zocky below says more than I could say in a thousand words about why we must, however reluctantly, ban unregistered editors from the WP.
It has not escaped my notice, incidently, that part of my frustration with the claim that we must at all costs preserve the right to edit anonymously, is that I still find it difficult to understand why anyone would feel (apparently) that this right trumps all other considerations in promoting the stated goals of the WP. Some users hint that they believe that habitual anons are too shy to register even under a pseudonym. I can well understand why users might not wish to use their IRL identity here--- in fact, from my own experience I'd probably even recommend editing under a pseudonym (too late, in my case!)--- but while WP is not without security flaws, the Wikimedia privacy policy is easy to find and the registration process is fast and easy. So, I tend to wonder why some users seem to have a huge problem with establishing even this minimal level of responsibility for their actions here. Speaking as one deeply concerned about current trends in my own country (the U. S.), I find it hard to understand why people concerned about supression of dissent or whatever would fail to recognize that free speech does not entail free denial of responsibility for what you do and say in a public forum.
I'd like to see a kind of round table discussion of all these issues (I'd guess participants would have to start by agreeing upon some list of issues to discuss, heh), in hope that as a community we can make wise decisions of this difficult and painful nature. If nothing else, in such a forum perhaps someone who truly believes that the right to edit anonymously trumps all other considerations for the health of the WP can explain their reasoning to me. Indeed, we might all perhaps learn that addressing the thorny problem of suppressing wikicruft is even more difficult than we had each previously realized! ---CH 09:59, 8 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
You may be overlooking an important factor, that is recruitement. People burn out or just go do other stuff in life. We need a constant influx of new good editors. Most of started as anons, and many of us would have never tried editting in the first place in registration was required. Zocky 12:26, 8 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  • I can see why Jimbo "had to do something" relating to the recent embarrassment, and it's actually something I was thinking of as a possible way of slightly discouraging the stream of ridiculous test or joke new articles. The downside is losing the signal that an IP address instead of a username gives of likely vandalism (still relevant in edits), but it's sneakier vandalism or hoaxes that are more problematic. It might be a possible help if anon edits were subject to validation before appearing, and if there was a way of monitoring new registered users closely until they'd shown trustworthiness. Another approach might be to emphasise the unreliability of Wikipedia as a positive virtue, a useful reminder to students to always double-check sources: it excels as an introduction to a subject, but not as the truth on tablets of stone. The best answer to vandalism must be more people checking articles and edits, and we do need to rethink RfA which has too often become a way of testing useful editors to destruction rather than encouraging trustworthy people to play more of a part in monitoring quality (check out the WP:GRFA debate). ....dave souza 22:08, 8 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Zocky, Of course I agree that enlarging (not just maintaining) the community of active editors is essential to the continued growth of high quality content in WP. I suspect our only difference is this: I never edited anonymously before I became a registered user, but you did. I guess we both may have assumed that most other users are like ourselves. I'd like to see a survey of active WP editors to find out if an overwhelming majority agree with "I never would have started to edit the WP if registration had been required".
When I called for a public discussion here at WP in advance of major policy changes, I should have made it clear that I have in mind a "policy cyle" somewhat like this:
  • public discussion,
  • provisional implemention,
  • statistical study of logs, survey data, whatever seems useful,
  • assessment,
  • loop
One reason for careful public discussion before making changes is to avoid creating a situation where Wikimedia rapidly makes a chaotic sequence of possibly unannounced or at least insufficiently publicized WP policy changes, which would obviously be frustrating for everyone here. I said above that I much prefer spending time at WP creating new content to spending time on cruft patrol, and as you would guess, this implies that I don't want to have to (hypothetically) spend energy trying to track rapidfire WP policy changes in real time so that I can be confident that I am not violating any policies with any given edit.
I should also stress that when I mentioned public discussion in advance of policy changes above, I did not mean to imply that the WP Board, sysops, or admins, should be prevented from taking emergency measures as needed, since occasional unanticipated circumstances seem to be unavoidable in a huge social enterprise like WP (or in maintaining any large website). Of course, in a well-run website any emergency measures should be reversible or amendable once the dust clears.
I also want to add that while I am frustrated with what I see as a weak and tardy response by the Board to the growth of the Wikicruft and accountability issues, we must all remember that one of the most remarkable aspects of the WP is that it has been built almost entirely by volunteers and has a comparatively tiny staff and operating budget, so we do need to cut the staff some slack in that respect. I am disappointed when I see Jimmy repeat shibboleths which do not accord with my own experience at WP, but I was struck by the comments of a poster at news.com, who drew a distinction between truth and knowledge, saying that while truth may ultimately be subjective, knowledge is something which can be shared. I also feel that we must avoid getting bogged down in disputes over moral philosophy or espistemology and focus on practical measures we can take as a community, and sharing seems to me to reside at the core of the WP experience. That might be worth keeping in mind.
I see another issue lurking in the background of this controversy. I don't much care for the possibility that the board might be more responsive to individuals who threaten legal action than to those who prefer to resolve content disputes by talk page discussion and if neccessary an appeal for arbitration, but we all need to recognize that as a practical matter it wouldn't take very many lawsuits to exhaust the WP operating budget (even if they have pro bono lawyers "on retainer"), and as I understand it, there is a real possiblity that a single adverse legal ruling could shut down the entire enterprise in a heartbeat.
Some outraged Wikipedians have suggested that Siegenthaler should have simply edited his own bio and have done with it. I think that is an absurd suggestion: no-one should have to waste time in daily edit wars with some anonymous crank to correct blatant factual misinformation, certainly not when the misinformation insinuates involvement in pedophilia, terrorism or murder (probably the most inflammatory charges I can imagine in the modern world). But perhaps these users were merely trying to express the sharp distinction between technology and social mechanisms which are inexpensive and involve volunteer labor versus those which are expensive and involve highly paid professionals. One reason I think the admin system needs overhaul is that currently I think there are some technical problems which make it more difficult than need be the case for newbies to discover and grasp the distinction between "wikifriendly" ways of doing things (like resolving content disputes over allegations of factual inaccuracies) and "wikihostile" ways. Naturally, we should do everything we can to encourage wikifriendly modes of discourse and dispute resolution.
Beyond this, we probably need to try harder to help technically incompetent newbies learn our ways, or at least seek effective assistance from more experience/competent users if they are having trouble accomplishing some legitimate goal here (like correcting factual misinformation). This is a huge challenge, but one thing is clear: layout is a crucial component of ensuring that WP is easy to use effectively. For example, while Wikipedians like to say that in the event of a quarrel, the sequence of events can be readily reconstructed from the history page, it only takes one technical incompetent to render a history or talk page virtually unreadable--- and now it seems that history pages are limited to the previous 500 edits, which isn't enough in some cases. Also, edit histories are currently almost impossible to reconstruct if a page underwent several moves. These usability issues combine technical and policy elements; technical problems and possible solutions can be best explored by the sysops (i.e. developers, not admins). From time to time I have noticed them playing with various changes, not always with good results. I'd like to see a "developer's sandbox" where they can test describe the rationale for and given samples of proposed layout changes and get feedback from users. ---CH 23:09, 8 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  • Is there any reason why User space page creation is also restricted? 132.205.44.134 01:43, 10 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

The solution to vandalism

Protection policies do NOT work
Even if you somehow manage to stop the "deluge" of vandalism, you are effectively cutting off anyone who could make meaningful contributions to the articles. The regular users of Wikipedia cannot possibly have enough knowledge to make helpful contributions, save copying the information from other sources. If you expect someone to add new content, it is most likely the people who have not been to wikipedia much before. The frequent users just copy content from other sources, wikipedia is merely a storehouse that is accumulating knowledge from what is already known.

If a user vandalizes, ban their account and/or their ip
Proxy server you say? Well ban the proxy server, proxy IPs should not be allowed to edit either
These temporary ban or edit limitation ideas are nonsense
What if an IP is used by more than one person you say? If one user screws it up for the rest, too bad. You need to weed out the vandalizers no matter what it takes. If that means excluding the 100 people that are using the IP, oh well. Most likely, 1 out of those 100 would actually ever make a meaninfull contribution anyway, and they would use a different computer if they really wanted to add something.

How you find the vandalizers is up to you, but once you find them it is clear what must be done.
Ban the vandalizers, ban them all, no strikes, no second chances. If they decide to vandalize an article, they do not deserve to come back, end of story.

--Rain 23:05, 5 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

The frequent users just copy content from other sources, wikipedia is merely a storehouse that is accumulating knowledge from what is already known. Yes, that's the idea, see No Original Research and Verifiability. These are some of our most important guiding principals. You may have a misconception about what Wikipedia is supposed to be. It is true, however, that field experts are often more adept at finding, understanding, and integrating sources related to their fields, so your point still has merit. —Bunchofgrapes (talk) 23:16, 5 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
That is why I said that. I do not appreciate the addition to my discussion page, I am not a newbie to Wikipedia. Pulling together information from outside sources and combining them would be new content. I did not mention new research or verifiable information.

Wikipedia moderators need to stop being afraid banning users and ban them. You will not lose any content, as you say it is knowledge that is already known, someone will add it sooner or later. The goal is to stop the exisiting additions from getting changed for the worse. --Rain 23:28, 5 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
I suppose you're suggesting that we start by banning the 15 million users on AOL? --Carnildo 00:00, 6 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
If Wikipedia doesn't have the balls to ban the offenders, and Wikipedia dislikes the vandalism, then you can't win. One or the other has to be true, not both. I really wish wikipedians would stop complaining, and stop the endless rants about vandalism. Perhaps someone vandalised my comments on this page, how would you ever know when you don't look? Do bears really shit in the woods when no one is watching? --Rain 00:36, 6 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
The way everybody -- including the 15 million (or however many) users on AOL -- is treated should I think be radically changed, within a radically changed WP. They should get usernames, and should then have to prove the integrity of these usernames via suggested changes. IFF those suggestions are consistently good (once a genuine "newbie" period has elapsed), the username can then be lent the power to edit articles directly, a power that's revoked when the username blatantly screws up.
Blatant vandalism is very irritating and a waste of many people's time, but actually pretty straightforward. What's worse are things like (i) the scrupulous copying of factoids from other "sources" that are themselves unreliable (and often pretty obviously so, when examined by an adult who's at least moderately well educated and intelligent) and (ii) the vehemence with which such additions are then defended.
What I have in mind would entail a drastic reduction in the addition of new content. Much of the new content that WP wouldn't get would be good. Its loss would indeed be a pity. But it would also get much less blather, leading it to be more highly regarded, and I think in turn leading it to attract more qualified contributors. -- Hoary 04:08, 6 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
I'd say "If you want Nupedia, you know where to find it", but it seems to be dead. Guess why....--Stephan Schulz 20:06, 6 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
A non-wiki wikipedia? that would be scandalous!!!!--Alhutch 20:10, 6 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
What Hoary mentioned is not Nupedia. Nupedia is an entirely different concept --Rain 17:46, 8 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

The solution to vandalism is to repair broken windows quickly. 216.237.179.238 21:15, 6 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Catalog of defamation incidents

Perhaps, in light of the recent fiasco concerning John Seigenthaler Sr., known attempts at using Wikipedia for defamation should be documented, perhaps in the Wikipedia namespace? I would limit such a list to significant character attacks which persist for some minimum duration--anonymous rants of "g30rg3 bu$h is an 33d10t!" which are reverted in minutes don't qualify. I just removed an (unsubstantiated, as far as I can tell) rape allegation from the article on Ahmad Rashad (alleged to have occured when he was a student at the University of Oregon), that has been there since October 2005. A quick search of google reveals nothing. Now, student-athletes commiting sex crimes and being protected by campus authorities is certainly not unheard of--but Wikipedia should not repeat such allegations without firm and verifiable evidence. (A bogus link, claiming to be evidence, was included in the article as well). --EngineerScotty 00:07, 6 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Go for it. You may also want to pen some more guidelines such as the ones above. --Gurubrahma 06:49, 6 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Such a page is now up at Wikipedia:List of known defamation incidents. 3 incidents (Seigenthaler, Jens Stoltenberg, and Rashad) are listed, as are a proposed set of rules. The rules are only proposals at this point. (The interesting question--how much time will elapse before the page is slapped with an AFD?) --EngineerScotty 23:03, 6 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
The current title perhaps suggests that legal action was taken in the cases listed, i.e. somebody sued for defamation. Is this at all true? Dmharvey 00:27, 7 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
AFAIK, no. In some cases, the issues were discovered and reverted by Wikipedia editors; only two of the listed cases (the Norwegian PM and Seigenthaler) attracted any press attention. Seigenthaler would probably have a difficult time suing WP under US law (IANAL) due to the provisions of the CDA; don't know about the other case (where Norwegian law may come into play). One other interesting question (and maybe this page leads here): In the US at least, a common defense against libelous information which is published in error, rather than maliciously, is the publication of a retraction--for example, if the local newspaper mistakenly puts your photo next to a caption indicating "wanted for bank robbery"; and it was done in error, they can avoid liability by retracting the information upon notification of the error. --EngineerScotty 01:00, 7 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
What some call "defamation" others call "information". Consider renaming. (SEWilco 00:29, 8 December 2005 (UTC))[reply]

I question whether this is a good idea. It seems to encourage a certain type of vandal to make trouble, hoping to score an entry. -- Jmabel | Talk 00:47, 12 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

New protection template?

I have created a new template at Template:Nprotect to handle situations where the article is about to go out to a wide audience; for example, being posted on Slashdot or an interview about Wikipedia. Is this a good idea, a bad idea, or just an idea? Thanks, Luc "Somethingorother" French 00:26, 6 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

It's a bad idea because we don't protect articles just because they are slashdotted. We can handle slashdot trolls with our eyes closed, as we did the other day. When a page is protected because Jimbo's on TV about it, well....then it's just {{vprotected}}.
We should never protect a page that gets linked from a somewhere prominent. We could lose far more good editors than what we would temporarily gain.--Sean|Black 00:29, 6 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
There is already Template:P-protected, it is in use for the John_Seigenthaler_Sr. article for example --Rain 04:50, 6 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Is this lack of comments because nobody at all cares? Or it because everybody assumes the template is redundant? If it's the latter, I could just make the template a redirect to Template:P-protected, and leave it at that. Thanks, Luc "Somethingorother" French 07:56, 10 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

A question

This is a card. In the CNN interview, Phillips said that there are 'people who can't print articles about themselves.' And answering them all, "go thou and change it" won't do. They're all going to gang up on us now. If they gather in large enough numbers...brr. No?

What troubles me is that a country like America is very sensitive to words, whether or not they be of substance. And America was watching today...--VKokielov 04:32, 6 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Well. America's the U.S. is not the only country in the world. --DanielCD 14:46, 7 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

User vandalizing Belarus-related topics

Hello everyone; I'm not registered here but still I think that I can make my little contributions. User:Electionworld has been vandalizing every article about political parties in Belarus, putting in every article that the ellections were not free and fair and similar things. I reacted by commenting this to him, but apparently it just made it worse. My main objections are two:

  • Being Belarus and its legally-constitued government -wether you like it or not, like Venezuela's Chávez- under pressure of other countries, namely the United States of America and its allies, it is a sensible topic that should be covered with extreme rely on NPOV principles. The ellections were considered only by some as unfair, and CIS observers didn't say so. If Belarusians like Lukashenko, Wikipedia can't lie nor hide any position or fall into intellectual terrorism.
  • All articles have the same text! It seems that this man is lobbying here... If there are objections to Belarusian democracy and its ellectoral system, that should be named and developed in Politics of Belarus and not in every article about that country. This is a separate topic, aside the articles' contents.
I was not saying that these elections were not free and fair (my opinion is not relevant in an encyclopedic article. At the party entries I just added after the results that the OSCE/ODIHR mission considered these elections not free and fair. Why should we hide that position? It is a fact that OSCE has this opinion. It is worthwile to mention that Belarus is a member of OSCE.Electionworld 07:58, 6 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Ignoring the fact that I think it's a bit over the top to mention this in every single article related to Belarusian politics, I do think it was a violation of WP:FAITH to call Electionworld's actions "vandalism". He/she was adding encyclopedic, factual and sourced statements to these articles, something which cannot be said for a lot of our other contributions. This is not vandalism by any means. Johnleemk | Talk 16:43, 6 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Well, don't call it vandalism if you don't consider it so; you're right, traditional and typical vandalism is another thing. I'll insist with the idea of intellectual terrorism; that is, repeating something everywhere to convince or persuade the reader of that thing. Electionworld, could you please develop as deep as you can this topic, but in Politics of Belarus?. In the articles a mere OSCE observers objected the proccess' fairness or similar would be great and leave place for naming Lukashenko's response to that.

Accessibility: stylesheets and text contrast

Is there a place to discuss Wikipedia accessibility?

A couple of editors suggested that text contrast in wikitable is insufficient. One editor pointed out that many elements in Wikipedia style share the same contrast and that we should not modify just one element.

I would like to discuss Wikipedia accessibility. Where is a good place? Bobblewik 10:02, 6 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Accessibility is within the charter of Wikipedia:WikiProject Usability. -- Rick Block (talk) 14:20, 6 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Aha, so I see. I have asked a question there. Thanks for letting me know. Bobblewik 15:15, 6 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]


New Feature Proposal

This proposal may better fit at Wikipedia:Village pump (technical). If so please feel free to move it there. The Seigenthaler debacle has had me thinking about a feature I have thought for quite a while may be a good thing. Part of the problem with the Seigenthaler article, in my mind, is that no one was watching it. The idea that "given enough eyes, all errors are shallow", only applies if there are enough eyes. I would like to see a list generated periodically (or in real time) that sorts articles by the number of users watching that article. This would allow interested parties to add underwatched articles to their watch lists so that vandalism there might be more likely to be detected. I have no idea how difficult (or easy) this would be to implement. Dsmdgold 17:12, 6 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

It's been proposed before. The concern was that it would just tell vandals where defense was lax. RJFJR 20:17, 6 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
how about a mechanism that alerts a randomly selected admin that a lightly-watched article has been touched... 216.237.179.238 21:10, 6 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
I suppose one could make it an admin-only function, although that would limit its utility. Dsmdgold 03:23, 7 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

FINDING THIS A MESS. HOW DO I EDIT AND NOT HAVE SOMEONE WIPE OUT CHANGES?

Cannot reach anyone....seems badly organized, any people have no email.

Getting no answers.

Who makes edits permanent?

WHO RUNS THIS PLACE????


ANYONE HOME?????

username BECKJORD


I placed some pointers in your talk page at User talk:Beckjord ≈ jossi fresco ≈ t • @ 22:21, 6 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I hear ya BeckJord...

Something needs to be done with the AMA, it's a good idea that's basically been abandoned. So, since I was too Bold in regards to WP:AUTO, consider this an intention of boldness to come. I think at this point the AMA can be officially considered "dead", and it's only a matter how to clean the slate and start over again. I'll send it to mfd in a few days if there's no initiative towards renewing things here. karmafist 03:24, 7 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia edit form notice (re GFDL) considered harmful

This text was added recently to the edit form: By editing here, you agree to licence your contributions under the GFDL.

Until now the GFDL was applied to Wikipedia as a whole, and would be based on its compilation copyright. The only copyright requirement on individual contributions that I know of was the rule (once implicit, lately explicit) that they must not violate a copyright.

This new rule is much stronger. In order to place something under the GFDL, you must first own the copyright yourself. Which means that this change has taken away the right to contribute any material written by someone else, even if

  • it is in the public domain,
  • the copyright holder already allows unlimited copying,
  • the copyright holder already allows copying for the purposes that Wikipedia requires -- such as by having already placed the material under the GFDL!

You now cannot even contribute your own material if you have placed it in the public domain.

Now, Wikipedia includes considerable amounts of material that was in the public domain when contributed. Copyright-expired encyclopedia articles, US government photos, and so on. I do not believe anyone intended to shut off these sources of content; I think the intent was that people should not be able to impose any restrictions through copyright that the GFDL does not.

For myself, I want to be able to contribute new material of my own without being required to have a copyright on it. I also want to be able to upload existing public-domain material if I happen to find some that would be useful. And I cannot imagine that anyone really wants me not to do so.

In which case, this statement in the form needs to be changed. 66.96.28.244 04:40, 7 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

  • IANAL, but as far as I understand, public domain is not a license and does not work the way you think it does. --Improv 06:08, 7 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
IANAL, but poster is quite mistaken. We have always, *always* required materials posted here to be licensed under GFDL. That has never been not-true in the entire time I've been here. Also, you misunderstand the public domain completely. --Brion 06:35, 7 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
IANAL, but I don't see how GFDL would prevent use of public domain material. It says that you cannot restrict the use of any material you copy from Wikipedia. Since you cannot restrict the use of material that is in the public domain anyway, I don't see what the problem is supposed to be. The only change I'm aware of since the first time I became involved in Wikipedia (2003) it that at the notice didn't use the phrase GFDL; it said you were agreeing to license your contributions under "the terms of the Wikipedia license" (which was, in fact, the GFDL.) The notice used to use stronger or plainer language than it does now, urging you not to contribute if you did not want your material to be widely and freely copied, or words to that effect. Dpbsmith (talk) 13:33, 7 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
It still says all that. There's an additional one-line message higher up as well, now. --Brion 02:22, 8 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

This is the original poster. I decided to wait a couple of days before coming back to this, to allow time for considered responses.

First, IANAL either, but I certainly understand that public domain material is that with no copyright restrictions on it of any kind. GFDL, on the other hand, allows unlimited copying or modication provided that certain rules are followed. Clause 2 requires that all copies include a notice of the license; this is sometimes called a "viral condition" because of its "infectious" nature. Similarly, Clause 4 requires modified versions to be identified by a change of title, among other things.

Dpbsmith says that "Since you cannot restrict the use of material that is in the public domain anyway, I don't see what the problem is supposed to be." The problem is precisely that the GFDL does restrict its use, even though only in the small and well-intended ways that I've just mentioned. Therefore it requires the work to be under copyright, and a contributor cannot "agree" to place it under GFDL if it is not.

If, as Brion says, it was always the intent that each individual contribution, rather than the totality of contributed material, was to be licensed under GFDL, then I say that there was always a problem, which the new wording has simply called attention to.

The issue is not whether I want to allow my contribution to be widely and freely copied, or whether I object to the GFDL's intent; it is whether I have the authority to license my contribution under a particular license (one that does impose restrictions even if they are small ones) if it is in the public domain already. Simply, I do not.

Is my objection now clear?

It is entirely reasonable for a GFDL'd work (i.e. the entire Wikipedia) to contain public-domain material; it is not reasonable to ask for a single contribution to be GFDL'd if it is already in the public domain. So the resolution I would like to see would be to substitute something like this (which I believed was always the intent): "All Wikipedia content is released under the GFDL. Your contributions must not violate any copyright."

66.96.28.244 23:57, 9 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Some numbers about new pages

After I heard about the latest experiment with page creation privileges, I was interested to see how much good and bad comes out of anon IPs creating pages. So I went ahead and slaved away for a couple of hours, and tried to collect some data. I looked at the new pages from Friday, 2 December that still exist. I checked last ten pages created in each of the hours, that's 240 pages. Unfortunately, my Firefox died a noble death after I had 80 something tabs open, so I mostly didn't get to do anything about pages that need attention. I also looked at the delete log for Friday. Trying to find out anything meaningful from there would require even more work than this, so I came up with a shortcut: I looked only at the pages in article space that were deleted with the standard summary "Content was foo and the only contributor was bar", and counted IPs and logged users. I reckon that roughly as many articles were deleted friday through AfD as there were nominated for AfD, so I went and pretended that all deleted articles were new pages and added them to the pages that still exist. Here are the results, along with extrapolated values for all new pages from Friday (numbers in italics are calculated, upright numbers are data I gathered):

New pages, Friday, December 2, 2005 pages I checked calculated values for all pages created on Friday
created by: IPs logged in total IPs logged in total
new pages, still existing 95 145 240 773 1182 1955
good pages, properly done 63 125 188 513 1018 1531
good pages, didn't get attention from experienced users 16 10 26 130 82 212
all good new pages 79 135 214 643
(37%)		 1100
(63%)		 1743
on AFD 7 3 10 57 24 81
bad pages, should be deleted 8 3 11 65 25 90
mistakes (wrong language, namespace, etc.), should be deleted or moved 1 4 5 8 33 41
all bad pages still existing 16 10 26 130 82 212
deleted pages 264 89 353 1149 388 1537
all bad new pages 280 99 379 1280
(73%)		 469
(27%)		 1749
all new pages 359 234 593 1935
(55%)		 1557
(45%)		 3492
At Friday's rate
  • anons were creating 706,275 pages/year – 234,695 (33%) good, 471,580 (67%) bad
  • logged in users were creating 568,305 pages/year – 397,120 (71%) good, 171,185 (29%) bad
  • all users were creating 1,274,580 pages/year – 636,195 (49.92%) good, 638,385 (50.08%) bad
Of pages created on Friday
  • 8% of bad new pages were left unattended for 3 days
  • 12% of good new pages were still unwikified after 3 days

Note: good and bad means pages that should have or should not have been created, not good or bad articles have been written. All this limited to article namespace.


It's bound to be off somewhat, but at least it's based on something. Any thoughts on what these numbers mean? Zocky 05:25, 7 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Well explain the lables first. Lotsofissues 18:04, 7 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Hmm... I thought they were self-explenatory :) Checked pages are those I checked, all pages are values extrapolated from the checked pages. Bad pages are those that shouldn't have been created (including pages that have since been deleted), good pages the opposite. New pages, still existing are pages created on last Friday which haven't been deleted in the meantime. Properly done means that the created page has been turned at least into a proper stub since it was created. Didn't get attention from experienced editor means that it's encyclopedic information, which still hasn't been turned at least into a proper stub. Should be deleted means created pages that we should have speedied or afd'd, but which we missed. On AFD means that the page has been nominated for AfD. This doesn't necessarily make it a bad page, but since the number is relatively small and doesn't have a great influence on the end results, I went ahead an pretended that they're all bad. Zocky 18:29, 7 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
If this is an experiment why does the message given to IPs no longer mention it is a temporary measure ? Robmods 18:16, 7 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Quite fascinating! Although IPs do not significantly outperform registered editors in terms of the volume of garbage produced (55% by IPs), they are disproportionately likely to create bad articles (66% for IPs versus 30% for registered). It will be interesting to repeat this in a few weeks to see whether preventing IP page creation has any effect. —Kirill Lokshin 18:24, 7 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
That's true. Logged in users are on average much better editors than IP's. Another thing worth of notice is that on Friday, IPs were producing good pages at the rate of 234,695 per year. Zocky 18:29, 7 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Any idea what proportion of these are redirects? I know at one point I was creating dozens at a time... Shimgray | talk | 22:07, 7 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Hmmm... must not be many, I don't think I saw any in that sample. I tried the first 30 links in Special:Newpages now and none of them was a redirect. So either new pages are not showing redirects, or people are not making many. Zocky 23:57, 7 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
No, redirects don't show up in Special:Newpages. —Cryptic (talk) 02:36, 8 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Though they seem to appear retroactively, if the second edit stops them being a redirect. At least, I'm sure I saw one last night. Interesting. Shimgray | talk | 14:33, 8 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
I would be willing to bet that if you divided the logged-in users between those who have had an account less than two months (or maybe one month) with those who have been editing longer, that you would also see a significant difference in the pattern of edits. BlankVerse 22:11, 7 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Absolutely. There is definitely the progress from anon->red link user->blue link user->name sounds familiar->admin->good user, with each of the stages doing less damage and more good. Zocky 22:57, 7 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Hmmm, interesting order for the last two there. On topic, I think the big number here is that extrapolated 234,695 pages a year by anons -- that is a huge amount of content. If this new policy is causing us to lose even 10 percent of that, it is a serious problem. Christopher Parham (talk) 01:08, 8 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Well, it's harder to be what I call a "good user" (maybe I should have said "very good user") than to become an admin, and we have plenty of very good users who are not admins. Zocky 01:14, 8 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Christopher said On topic, I think the big number here is that extrapolated 234,695 pages a year by anons -- that is a huge amount of content. If this new policy is causing us to lose even 10 percent of that, it is a serious problem. I don't think this is a problem at all. We are now reaching a point were we need to focus on improving what articles we have, rather than on creating new ones. (Of course this doesn't mean that we have everything we should have now — see WP:MEA.) — mark ✎ 11:42, 8 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
I don't see why the two aren't going on simultaneously. In this case, there's an anon who wants to add a new page, and the question is do we get that page or not. Denying him the ability to add that page is hardly going to funnel his efforts into improving our other articles; we're simply going to lose the information and gain nothing. Generally, I don't see how stopping anons from creating new pages helps us improve the articles we already have. Christopher Parham (talk) 05:58, 9 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

This number crunching is splendid and way beyond my capabilities, but I think you'd agree that an analysis of surviving pages is skewed in favour of non-logged in new page creators, as the IP number gives a strong hint that a new page needs checking and a high proportion of them are deleted within minutes. Making would-be vandals sign up before creating new pages has the advantage of tending to mean that all new pages are treated with equal suspicion. What's needed is enough people willing to check pages and not just hit the obvious rubbish while letting subtle vandals through. A question: is there duplication of effort with good pages being checked repeatedly? ...dave souza 10:44, 9 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

pls unblock me

i have more than 3000 edits, see "user contributions" - i was blocked for no reason. User:Haham hanuka

See the comments here: Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Haham hanuka. That might have something to do with it. Otherwise, contact the admin that blocked you for more direct info. --DanielCD 14:35, 7 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
That would be Brian0918. --DanielCD 14:39, 7 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Notice of discussion about possible policy proposals at RfC

There is an ongoing discussion at Wikipedia talk:Requests for comment/Roylee in which at some users expressed that existing policies/structures have proven insufficient for countering the systematic introduction of believable nonsense, as illustrated by one user. Things are currently in the discussion stage and any formed policy proposals that emerge would obviously come here, but I figured that a courtesy notice would be in order at this point. Further comments are of course welcome. - BanyanTree 17:45, 7 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

There seems to be a related proposal at WP:FN (redirects to Wikipedia:Footnotes), which is marked as a guideline but there hasn't been any consensus formed to adopt it that I can see (or perhaps guidelines are a bit like that). IMO some wider discussion of the implications of this would be a good thing. See also Wikipedia:WikiProject Fact and Reference Check for some background to these proposals. Andrewa 19:22, 11 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

External Links "spamming" ... especially for cities

A certain anonymous user has been linking to their website about water towers in multiple city articles within Ontario, Canada. I found the Wikipedia style guide on external links to not be specific enough (and should I be weary it's not actually policy?) I still left a note about adding the links on the user's talk page about it though. Anyway there was a quick dicussion about external links on the Toronto talk page. My stance is with Krupo as he stated:

  • I don't think the external links area serves as a place to promote your website just because it has some connection to Toronto. It should at least add something to the reader's understanding with original content, eh?

Is this a commmon concensus sort of thing? All these water tower links are connected to the cities, but they don't add anything to the reader's understanding of the article if there's nothing in it about watertowers. If there was a little one-liner about them, would the links have reason to stay? If nothing else, I would appreciate if someone would point me in the right direction here :) Thanks, Mrtea 22:41, 7 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

  • Personally speaking, I'd have purged them - they don't particularly add anything to the individual articles, if Barrie is representative... Wikipedia is not here to link to every single useful page on a single subject; we want to link to at most half a dozen good and useful ones. WP:NOT a web directory. Shimgray | talk | 13:50, 8 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

User Bill of Rights

Wikipedia:User Bill of Rights: So we can build a better encylopedia without capricious interference, we should know what rules apply. (SEWilco 16:51, 8 December 2005 (UTC))[reply]

WP:ENC

I'm wondering if it's worthwhile to merge the data for this(to WP:RULES, WP:NOT and BJAODN), I think it's pretty obvious that it makes no sense to have an entire page to mocking peoples' ignorance of Wiki-policy(which has become in desperate need of reform anyway, so this might be a subconsious plea to do something), especially since it just says what Wikipedia is not. Sound familiar anyone? karmafist 18:37, 8 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Draft policy for comment: Information suppression

Following considerable discussion concerning selective POV suppression on Talk:NPOV, a draft policy for discussion has been put together on Information suppression.

Draft policy for discussion is at Wikipedia:Information suppression -- please help improve it, or leave an opinion and contribution on the talk page. FT2 19:31, 8 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Speedy criteria A7

I think we either have to deprecate this or give better guidance on what constitutes a claim of non-notability. I just removed Mary Welsh Hemingway from the speedy category, it was tagged on the basis that it did not assert the importance or significance of the subject. Is being married to Ernest Hemingway and a journalist for a national paper not enough to qualify as important or significant? Steve block talk 12:01, 9 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

So revert it and leave a nasty polite'n'explanatory note on the tagger's user talk page. I find people tagging perfectly comprehensible (if quite deletable) pages as patent nonsense all the time, but that's no reason to deprecate it. You're under no obligation to speedy an article just because someone's put a template on it. —Cryptic (talk) 13:01, 9 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Been there, done that myself too. Is there not an issue here that such taggings are vandalism? And should we also not consider the message we send to contributors of such pages? I appreciate what you say, but sadly disagree. Still, fair play, I'll withdraw once again. Steve block talk 13:22, 9 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Accidents aren't vandalism. Vandalism requires bad-faith. Of course an accident that keeps on happening becomes progressively less accidental. -Splashtalk 13:30, 9 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Fair play. Steve block talk 13:35, 9 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

SWIFT codes

Should Wkipedia host a list of SWIFT banking codes (used when wiring money from one bank to another)? Please comment at Talk:List of SWIFT codes. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 17:39, 9 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Proposed Semi-protection policy

There currently is a straw poll running at Wikipedia talk:Semi-protection policy, dealing with a creation of an intermediate level of protection for pages with extreme levels of vandalism from new users. Right now, the policy has strong support, but additional input is always welcome. Titoxd(?!? - did you read this?) 21:27, 9 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, please come! This is not another minor policy!! MAKE YOUR VOICE HEARD! Please don't let this slip by, and at least just read #Rehashing for a general overview, then VOTE! -Mysekurity(have you seen this?) 05:55, 10 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Desired disambiguation Template use?

I've been seeing some backlash against Template use. Is there specific policy on this? Is this just an attitude, or a trend? A couple of instances that happened to me today:

  1. Somebody changed an existing geodis to disambig, among other drastic deletions to the page. When queried on her/his Talk, said: "The geo dab template is useless. A dab is a dab, as far as I can tell, and I see no reason to have multiple templates."
  2. The disambiguation heading at Antioch had misspelled Antioch (among other problems), and all the useful information in it was already in the first line of the article. Rather than merely fixing the bad stuff, I replaced it with the usual Otheruses. Seemed the perfect spot for that template. It was quickly "reverted" (although it was actually an edit that also fixed the old misspellings) with the tag: "Hard to believe someone would deliberately put the obnoxious one-size-fits-all "otheruses" template in place of a notice tailored to the page. Reverting."

What should be done in these cases?

--William Allen Simpson 22:51, 9 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I was the one making the first comment. Surely the pump isn't the place to discuss this specific instance, is it? Shouldn't we be at the geo dab talk page or the dab talk page itself? That's where we'll find the other people interested in this issue. Pick a place and I'll meet you there. Tedernst | talk 00:23, 10 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, I thought it polite not to mention you by name. Actually, since I thought these issues had long since been resolved (many months ago), and there are now hundreds of pages using the template, it seemed a wider policy discussion would be in order. However, on issue #1, it appears that yet another avid discussion has broken out on Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (disambiguation pages) in the past few days. Perhaps issue #2 can be (re-)raised there again, too.... William Allen Simpson 15:29, 10 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

WP:WSS/P

I don't understand the need to propose stubs when they could just be made, particularly when it's unclear who they're being proposed to. Do we have to propose articles before they're made? No, of course not. Until I get enough people to delete it, I'm going to WP:IAR in regards to WSS/P unless i'm unsure about a stub, and even then, I still might make it and if users don't like it, it'll be on WP:SFD soon enough. karmafist 23:34, 9 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Did you actually read what was at Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Proposals? I don't follow it very closely, but it is not about proposing individual stub articles -- but rather about proposing stub types, stub categories, and stub templates. older≠wiser 23:45, 9 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Sorry, Bkonrad, you misunderstood me. I'm talking about things that look like this {{Whatever-stub}}, not actual articles. karmafist 01:17, 10 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
I see. Like I said, I don't follow it very closely--I suppose the idea is to encourage some sort of order to how stub templates are used. I don't think anyone can really prevent you from creating stub templates--like you say, templates that aren't liked will end up "on WP:SFD soon enough". older≠wiser 03:10, 10 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  • Yeah, I agree with you on that, I always more or less figured that page was something of a joke. Generally uncontroversial, easily revertible actions like making a template are exactly where WP:BOLD applies. Christopher Parham (talk) 03:15, 11 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Copyrights % non commercial licenses

(from Wikipedia:Copyright FAQ)

I'm confused as to why certain liceses are banned... Firstly, the non commercial license: "There are many different kinds of non-commercial licenses, but generally they say something like You may use, copy, or distribute this work for non-commercial purposes."

Surely Wikipedia is not a commercial project, and thus these licenses are allowed by U.S. law, correct? And yet here they are listed as prohibited.

There's also the educational license: "Others include all forms of public education, including encyclopedias, to be educational."

Again, this is an encyclopedia, so I fail to see any reason why these shouldn't be allowed. In cases where licenses allow only for use by schools and colleges, this would not be the case, of course, but surely it would be OK in all other cases?

In both cases, the email linked to did not help clarify this in the slightest, so I was hoping someone here could explain it to me.

All content here must be usable for commercial purposes (except fair use, which is a whole other story). All text must be GFDL, and can be other (alternate) licences too (although in practice figuring out what is dual-licenced is almost impossible). The Wikimedia Foundation does (in Germany, at least) make very limited commercial use of content, and lots of our mirrors do. It wouldn't be free if you couldn't sell it. But as it's free, it's commoditised, so no-one is going to be able to sell it for very much. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 23:53, 9 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
along the same lines that Finley wrote, Wikipedia is a Free encyclopedia -- all material used must also be freely reusable. Licenses that place restrictions on reuse (beyond requiring attribution) are not free and are thus incompatible with the GFDL. older≠wiser 23:57, 9 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Yep, to "educational only" it's much the same as above: we don't limit what folks do with our stuff - in particular, it's not limited to encyclopedias. Can an open-source CD player display the article for the song or band that's playing? Can a local tourist office make a kiosk PC that allows visitors to learn about the surrounding area and its history, using Wikipedia content? We deliberately want these uses, and millions like them, to be made of our content. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 00:01, 10 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not offhand sure of the educational-only prohibition, but the major problem with "non-commercial" is that many non-commercial clauses essentially mean that you cannot take any money for the product. This is fine as long as we're on the web. If we want to make a DVD copy and sell it - like the German wikipedia did, selling thousands at ten euros each - this becomes impractical; it essentially makes it impossible to have a printed version at all.
Even if the non-commercial license turns out to only be "you must not make a profit", we're still screwed - arranging distribution of something so you don't make a profit yet don't lose money is really tricky, and in many cases (like the German one above) we're not distributing it ourselves - it's a private company selling it for a nominal cost, yet making a small profit (they gave us a euro per copy - 10% is a good cut!). Distributing via commercial companies, who already have the infrastructure in place, is arguably the only efficient way to do such a thing... and they tend to be for-profit organisations, thus rendering a "non-commercial use by nonprofits" interpretation problematic.
Magnus Manske has a decent summary here, which may be worth looking at (there was an argument on wikien-l, the project mailing list, about this a week or two back) Shimgray | talk | 00:03, 10 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Another reason was part of Jimbo's (and I guess lots of people's) vision for Wikipedia: that it could be packaged in some format (whether paper or electronic) and distributed in the third world to folks who don't have reasonable access to the web version. It's only reasonable that the little Nairobi printer or Salavan DVD burner guy can sell it (to schools or whatever) for a fair price - if we insisted on no-one making any profit, then only charities could do so (and you might well think that charities have rather more immediate problems on which to spend their money). As the content is free and fairly easy to get, our little Nairobi printer can't corner the market and become a big giant hyperweathy Nairobi printer, as some hungry little agile guy will undercut him. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 00:18, 10 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
It's also important to allow derivative commercial works. Much of the world's creative content is controlled by corporations, and the ability for this content to be enriched by incorporating our content will benefit not only individual companies but the audiences that consume their content, in the same way that, say, synthesizers have contributed to popular music. Imagine a fiction or nonfiction book using our text or images to add value, or some of our text being edited and used in a movie or television script. We are a raw ingredient in many future works. Deco 02:07, 10 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Red links and "Page creation limited" notice

If a non-registered user attempts to create a new page, they now see a notice that begins as follows:

Page creation limited
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Wikipedia has restricted the ability for unregistered users to create new pages...

The problem here is that the user may not have been attempting to create a new page. They may just have tried to follow a link from an ordinary article -- either they didn't know what a red link means, or they were using a browser that didn't render it specially at all. (I often access wikipedia in monochrome through lynx, for example.) And it looks awfully unfriendly if someone is just trying to find out more about, oh, say, the Gas Belt (from the Indiana article), and here they get this page that's shouting about restrictions.

I think the notice should look something like this:

Article not found
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
We don't have an article called Gas Belt
But you can write it. As an unregistered user, you have two choices... (and then continue with something like the present notice).

See what I mean? Says the same thing, but much more friendly. 66.96.28.244 00:20, 10 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Sounds good to me. Deco 00:28, 10 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
I agree. -- Kjkolb 02:52, 10 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Done. -- Rick Block (talk) 17:55, 10 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks! -- 66.96.28.244 07:15, 11 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Template:Meatpuppet

Due to the persistent and increasing problem of meatpuppetry - the deliberate recruitment and injection of new editors into WP:AFD debates by the creators of the article - I have created a meatpuppet template. This can be placed on the page of any user who is suspected of being a meatpuppet. Example: A new user who was asked to come here from a non-notable website to vote for the retention of that article would be tagged as a meatpuppet of the article creator. Firebug 18:27, 10 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

  • ... and remain evermore branded, even though xe might have otherwise chosen to stay and to begin contributing elsewhere? Uncle G 19:48, 10 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

What is the current official license policy? E.g. for uploading an image?

Are the descriptions in the FAQ and at this page fully correct and up to date? If so, is that consistent with this injunction?:

Content must not violate any copyright and must be based on verifiable sources. By editing here, you agree to license your contributions under the GFDL.

If not, is anyone checking to make sure that major WP policies are always easy to find, whether by clueless newbies or allegedly experienced active users (like me)? TIA---CH 20:43, 10 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

WP:CITE - too big?

  • Wikipedia talk:Cite sources - is it time for a change to this long-standing page? Does it still serve its' original purpose? Is it helping or hindering the addition of references to Wikipedia, which in light of recent events seems to be of more importance than ever? Editors are invited to comment. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Dan100 (talk • contribs) 08:34, 11 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

See Notice of discussion about possible policy proposals at RfC above for some related issues. This seems to be a hot topic. Andrewa 19:37, 11 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Images, Copyright, Etc.

This is specifically regarding the article Stalking Cat. Because of the nature of this page, it would be pretty nice for this article to have an image of the guy. Because his site has a big "do not reproduce" etc etc tag on it, i figured taking an image straight from his site was a bad idea, so I emailed him asking for a picture I could use in the wikipedia article. He emailed me back with a picture attached (he also commented on how the article contained lies).

Here's my (two part) question.

1. Is an email from him, the copyright holder of the image, enough to be considered permission to USE the image? 2. If I correct what he maintained were "lies" on his article, is that violated WP:NOR?

TastemyHouse Breathe, Breathe in the air 19:08, 11 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

1.: Is the use of the image conditioned on making certain (unreasonable) changes? In that case we probably can't use the picture as the conditions are too restrictive. Otherwise the email is a perfectly fine permission; I would suggest using the Template:Fair use in image tagging template.
2.: On the NOR issue; Wikipedia:Autobiography deals with this exact problem. On the other hand, we certainly should take it serious when he says our article contains lies - removing the disputed facts which are not backed up by a reputable source seems a good solution to me. Also consider that even if a fairly reputable source says something ebout him, there is a good chance that it isn't true: in my experience "back page" articles about subjects such as this tend not to be very well fact-checked. As such, I would personally give his email a relative high weight when considering what to do about the article.
I am getting a bit curious; would it be possible to see what he has written? Thue | talk 22:55, 11 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
I dont feel right pasting his private correspondence here, but I'll paraphrase. He said that the quote as the cost of his surgeries is innaccurate -- he says he doesn't keep track.
That was the only one that he has referred to specifically so far. I'm continuing the conversation though TastemyHouse Breathe, Breathe in the air 23:18, 11 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Skimming the references cited in the Wikipedia article, the source of the $200.000 seems to be this quote
Stalking Cat said he has lost track of how much his transformation has cost, though one figure quoted on a Web site estimates it would cost more than $200,000 — a figure Stalking Cat would neither confirm nor deny. He would only say, "It's a lot."
"one figure quoted on a Web site estimates" (unspecified website even) is not a very authorative source :). So I would definently trust his email on this one. Thue | talk 23:31, 11 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Its weird -- He has not yet explicitly given me permission to use an image. He replied to my request for image email with an image attachment, but didn't state in the email that I could use it. I replied and (among other things) asked if i had explicit permission to use the image. He did not reply to this part of that email.

What do you think? even though i dont have EXPRESS permission, should i post the image? TastemyHouse Breathe, Breathe in the air 00:29, 12 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

He must give you written, explicit permission before you can use his copyrighted image. It's also questionable in my mind whether fair use applies in this case, and if it doesn't our new image policy forbids uploading it even with explicit permission. Deco 01:16, 12 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Really? Even if the owner of the copyright gives permission? And I think this falls under "Publicity photos" under fair-use. TastemyHouse Breathe, Breathe in the air 01:26, 12 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

The question is, explicit permission under what terms? Remember that the default copyright terms are very restrictive, and to lift them generally requires something more precise than "you can use it." You should ask him specifically whether we can use it under the GFDL, or perhaps under one of the Creative Commons licenses (since those are a bit easier to understand.) —Steven G. Johnson 03:03, 12 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

So Wikipedia's now going to start outing anonymous users?

"Jimmy Wales, who founded Wikipedia, said that the site would make more information about users available to make it easier to lodge complaints." User:Zoe|(talk) 00:21, 12 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

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