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Wikipedia:Feature request (archive)

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See also: Wikipedia:Phase II bug reports and Wikipedia:Squashed bugs

This is a historical archive. Please see Wikipedia:Bug reports and feature requests for instructions on adding feature requests for the current system.

If you think there is something lacking in the software which runs this web site, please report it here. Wikipedians who are also Wikipedia:developers will evaluate what you say and take appropriate action on your behalf, such as:

  1. Providing technical details with our customized feature requst & bug-report tool, Bugzilla.

Features

General

  1. Is it possible to use international templates? Suppose there is an article Xxxx in English, German, French, etc. wikipedias. Suppose I translated this article into Ukrainian. Now I have to add to my article lins like en:Xxxx, de:Xxxx, fr:Xxxx, etc., then I have to add the link uk:Xxxx to the articles in all language versions: English, German, Franch etc. The number of language versions is continuously growing. Therefore it can be a lot of work, espacially in the case of articles on a very common subject. Is it possible to have an international template, say Interwiki:Xxxx containing all referencies like en:Xxxx, de:Xxxx, fr:Xxxx, etc. and all articles on the subject Xxxx in all language versions use this template? In this case, having created the article on Xxxx in the Ukrainian version, it would be sufficient to modify the international template Interwiki:Xxxx by adding there uk:Xxxx and reffer to this template in my Ukrainian article. Looks like much less work, doesn't it? * Is it possible from the technical point of view? * Does it require any essential software modification? Thanks in advance. --AndriyK 19:51, 24 September 2005 (UTC)
  2. Prevent anonymous users from changing external links or adding new ones. They are ALWAYS link spam.--Will2k 18:25, August 25, 2005 (UTC)
  3. Can someone supply Javascript to copy and paste highlighted text from the article textbox to the edit summary? This is something that takes me four clicks every time I do it, and I wish for an ALT-C shortcut.
    • Anything that makes edit summaries easier, would be good for inter-contributor communication. Uncle Ed 13:22, August 8, 2005 (UTC)
  4. Not a bug, but a feature request. Merriam Webster provides audio pronounciations of its words. You have a great definition of Matryoshka along with accompanying images. But I was unable to find any audio that would help me in actually saying the word. This may be something you do offer and I just couldn't see it.
    Tracey
    July 26, 2005
  5. It may not be a bug, but there does not seem to be an option to delete images, not even the images I uploaded myself, namely this one: [[1]]. I realised that it may violate some copyright restriction, so I'd like it removed, but I can't... Brother Laz 10:56, 26 July 2005 (UTC)th|Sth]] 23:10, 22 July 2005 (UTC)
  6. I wasn't able to link to files other than pictures,pdf, sounds or hyperlinks, but i need this funktion because i want to build an intranet-wiki with the option to open f.e. .dwg or .xls files. i'm not able to program in the source code. can anybody help me ?
    --Martin, July 21, 2005
  7. I like to browse wikipedia with the RANDOM ARTICLE button, but a large proportion of the articles are three-sentence stubs. It takes me a long time to actually get to a page that's really nice to read, full of information. Can you modify this button to bring people to a random article that is greater than, say, 4K of text? --Michael, 20 July 2005
    And BTW...to add to this page is not at all intuitive, and the features page doesn't seem to exist! :)
  8. It would be good if there was a version of wikipedia for WAP mobile phones. If you try using the normal version (assuming your phone supports HTML) most phones show all the contents of the article itself in a single column which means that the word "sentence" would be displayed as
    s
    e
    n
    t
    e
    n
    c
    e
  9. Have you guys thought of adopting a brain structure? A semantic network or similar. It is possible to do it and much more the way our minds work.
  10. Can you please make a Wikipedia toolbar for our browsers so we can search directly from any page. Also, the ability to search any highlighted text using the right-click menu (a la Google) would be useful.
  1. Relevant articles
  1. I have had a discussion about nav boxes. I want them and a admin with a bot have been removing them, in the discussion that followed I came up with the idea of having relevant articles in a list in the left most column below the "in other languages" box, I see that it is possible to make a template that contains other language links and if that template is used on a page, that page will get the languages, so now I wonder if there is anyway that we can implement a new box in the left hand column which would contain navigational links. Then make a template that contains the info for these links and therefore add the template to a many pages and get the all the same links in the box (preferable exluding the page itself :-) ). What I want this for is that each shark article should have links to all other shark articles but if we look at the Navigational_templates there seams to be a lot other examples also. Stefan 13:34, August 1, 2005 (UTC)
    This is a minor thing but when you click "show changes" and include the three tildas or four tildas, the show changes doesn't show the changed form of the tildas. In other words, it will display the three or four tildas. Just a minor suggestion, nothing major.Bubbleboys 18:10, 4 August 2005 (UTC)
  2. Slashdot had coverage about Wikipedia possibly freezing pages that are found to be reliable. It seems that isn't actually true, but if Wikipedia really is looking for a way to slow vandalism of popular pages, one possible solution would be to not display changes to a page for a certain amount of time if the page becomes very popular. This way, vandalism could be backed out before the time limit and would not show up, but actual contributions could still be made. The time limit wouldn't need to be very long if the page was quiet popular since there would be many people looking over it. Maybe 5 or 10 minutes. 30 at the most.
  1. Are there any plans to offer a search history similar to http://google.com/searchhistory?

I agree with Michael above (July 20) about the random page facility. It does tend to give only short pages, and I have also found that it doesn't appear to be all that random - quite a lot of the time it comes to a generic page about the statistics of US towns. Is there any way it can be made truly random? Thanks in advance, Paul , Aug 17 2005

  • Can you please make external links change color after you have visited them, as the internal links do, so we will know where we have already been? Slehar 18:13, 19 August 2005 (UTC)
See Bug 3112 - Different colours for visited/unvisited external links. Regards, JasonSpiro (talk) 22:44, 9 July 2010 (UTC)
  • When editing a page and scrolling up and down in the editor text window, it is annoying that when you reach the top or bottom of the page, the whole window starts to scroll. It would be better if the whole window would only scroll when the cursor was outside of the editor text window.Slehar 18:13, 19 August 2005 (UTC)
  • Editing a page would be very much easier if you could see the preview at the same time as the editor window, rather than having to scroll back and forth between views. Also, the Show preview function scrolls the editor window back to the top of the page, so for every little change you have to scroll back down to where you were.Slehar 18:13, 19 August 2005 (UTC)
  • Look and Feel: It is disturbing that the Horizontal Rule <HR> appears below headings, because it visually breaks the heading from the text that it heads. For example the [Edit] clicker appears to belong to the section above. It would make more sense to put the Horizontal Rule above the heading, to present the heading at the head of the section that it heads. Slehar 18:06, 22 August 2005 (UTC)
  2. The home page of wikipedia shows 'Espanol, la enciclopedia libre', where the word FREE has been translated wrong, it's supposed to say "La enciclopedia gratuita", HUGE MISTAKE.
  4. There should be a way for the system to recognise dates like 1st September or September 1st, since right now, regardless of your settings if it has an "st" or other suffix, the system doesn't recognise it and leaves it as it was written - Gerbon689 20:31, 30 August 2005 (UTC)


Donations: Twice I've tried to send money via PayPal, and twice it's put me into an infinite loop of "you're already registered, so you can't use that credit card." Why not just accept credit card numbers yourself?

I would suggest a new namespace, something like "Usercategory" or simmilar. It would work exactly like the Category namespace except it would be reserved for userpages and other user related stuff. Hopefully this would ease the complaints by some (few) people that Category:Wikipedians and it's subcategories "contaminate" the Category namespace by mixing user data and ensyclopedic stuff in the same namespace. It would also make it easier to exclude user related stuff from database dumps and such. --Sherool 20:43, 6 September 2005 (UTC)

  1. The default style is black font on white background, which is very strenuous, particularly for people who read wikipedia hours at a strech.This could be changed to something that is easy for the eyes. this may be done after consulting eye specialists and neuro-pshychriatists. September 8, 2005

New Feature Proposal: To solve the problem of bad edits, Wikipedia should have a feature requiring that some other user approves changes before they are posted. In other words, someone could makes a proposed change and it would be posted to a "changes" area (the opposite of "change history," sort of like a "proposed future change"). Then, when someone comes along to read the entry, they can be asked to approve the proposed change. There could be some technical rule that prevents the same IP address that made the change from making the approval to prevent self-approval, etc.

  1. Disambiguation pages

Disambiguation pages should show the links in order of how many times they were clicked on fro m the page. If it is a very hight percantage it should have a delay and go to the page that is just about always clicked on. --Adam1213 01:40, 11 September 2005 (UTC)

Easy to implement

I created template:talkheader because I think it's useful to have some brief intro (for newbies) and reminders (for everyone else) at the top of talk pages. Ideally, this would be accomplished in software to put such a message at the top of every talk page. Separately, but closely related, it would helpful to have a message specific to talk pages for the edit-box page (which comes up when you click edit) - currently you get the standard material relating to article editing. Quick instructions on using headers and tildes would help newbies quite a bit. An additional sophistication might be allowing registered users to turn off some or all of those messages. See also Wikipedia:Templates_for_deletion#Template:Talkheader_and_Template:Talkheaderlong. Rd232 20:20, 14 September 2005 (UTC)

I did post this suggestion a while ago somewhere in the Village Pump (I forget where), but since absolutely nothing came of that, I created the template as a stopgap/test. The template is now up for deletion (see link above), which I basically agree with, as it should really be in software (tho until then it's better than nothing). Rd232 20:20, 14 September 2005 (UTC)

Please add folders on "My Watchlist"

Hello, I am requesting that an option be added to "My Watchlist" that would allow you to sort your watched pages into categories and file them in different folders. This way if I am working on one topic I can find those watched pages in that category easily rather than hunting and pecking through my entire list of several hundred.--CrazyTalk 06:22, 17 September 2005 (UTC)

New interface

The current black font/white background interface is a huge strain on the eyes. The site should switch to a more ergonomic interface with dark background color. I've found reading something for only a few minutes to be painful, and I see absolutely no reason not to make the change.--Hipcat 17:30, 17 September 2005 (UTC)

We're supposed to assume good faith, but it s very likely that "Hipcat" is trolling. In his only other two contributions, he advocates abolishing Serbian and Croatian wikipedias in favor of Serbo-Croatian, and switching to British English exclusively.
If you're serious, you must not use the web much. Nearly all sites use dark lettering on a white background. -- Curps 18:47, 17 September 2005 (UTC)
Rather than resorting to false accusations, why don't you tell just what's wrong with switching to such an interface? Certainly, most sites do, but that does not mean wikipedia needs to.Hipcat 19:43, 17 September 2005 (UTC)
There are skins available to all users that can change the appearance of Wikipedia. Rather than proposing a little-supported coloring scheme, you may want to change your own skin from "monobook" to another in the user pref's. --Tryforceful 04:14, 12 September 2006 (UTC)

Hashing uploaded media

I think it might be worth considering storing a hash key of all uploaded media. This would have two benefits. Firstly it would eable you to warn people than an identical copy of the image they are trying to upload already exist under another name, and seconly it would allow you to effectively block known copyright violations from beeing uploaded again. It's naturaly far from foolproof as even the most minor change in an image would result in a different hash value, but it does "raise the bar" somewhat, and would hopefully help lessen the workload asosiated with managing uploaded images and media at least a little. --Sherool 23:53, 17 September 2005 (UTC)

Article Citations

I use Wikipedia to do research for college papers, and often need to make citations to Wikipedia articles. It would make my life a lot easier if there some tool that would allow a user to automatically generate citations for the article in the proper format (MLA, APA, etc). Encyclopedia Britannica does this, and it seems to work pretty well for them. I would imagine that the auto-gen'ed citations could be accomplished somewhat easily -- if so, it would make a great enhancement for researchers like myself. dean24_us 02:13, 27 September 2005 (UTC)

I strongly support this request. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus Talk 00:11, 6 October 2005 (UTC)
Thirded. It's about time someone requested that. -[[User:Mysekurity|Mysekurity]] [[additions | e-mail]] 02:28, 12 October 2005 (UTC).

Alternative Spellings and Redirects

Hello, I think it would be very helpful to provide a way to create article redirects faster than the current #refresh [Article_Name] notation. Making it easier for people to register alternative spellings and such will mean less people get the "Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name" message and more people get redirected to a relevant article. The following things are possible: 1. On the "Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name" page, have a direct text box and a button allowing people to create a redirect to the correct article. 2. On the "edit this page" page, have either a separate tox box for typing in a redirect or a toolbar button. 3. Have an extra "alternative spellings" page for each article, encouraging autors to type in as many alternative spellings as they can think of, rather than as many spellings as their patience to go through endless edits of #redirect tags allows them.

'Karma'/Barnpoints

I think it may be interesting to consider adding something like Slashdot Karma system - i.e. to allow registered users to rate other users. I am not suggesting adding or limiting user power based on points they have acumultated, but it may be a nice 'recognition' tool. I can see it combined with watchlist - show edits only by users with less then x barnpoints, thus effectively eliminating edits by well respected contributors. I am sure it can have other applications eventually. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus Talk 00:09, 6 October 2005 (UTC)

Main page article numbers

It seems to me the numbers on the main page like '730.000+ articles' are constantly outdated. Isn't there a way to just use the numbers that are used on the portals?

Flux Rating

There is a problem with Wikipedia articles that are changing rapidly. Users can not tell from the main page if the information they are reading is new and being edited frequently, in significant dispute, or being systematically vandalised. One potential solution to this would be an Edit Flux Rating for articles.


One indicator of a page that is in such states of flux is the number of characters changed during page edits in a period of time (say, a month), and presented as an average number relative to the amount of text present on the page at each edit. This could be used as a rating displayed on the page - the Flux Rating of the page, indicating the recent stability of the page. Potentially the flux rating of a page could even be presented graphically, to show the article flux over time.

The higher that number, the lower the confidence a user may have in the contents of the page. (an inverse flux may be easier for visitors to understand, making a stability rating. However, a flux rating is a more direct reflection of what is being measured. A stability rating would first have to be a working flux rating.)

Over time, the flux of a newly stable page will naturally decrease, and the rating will fall. In this way the visitors to the page may have increasing confidence in the information on that page.

A high number from several major recent edits will indicate a page in active change, exactly the point of a flux rating. The point is to establish relative stability/ instability as a marker. I understand that there can be many reasons for many recent and significant changes, both good and bad, but having an additional marker to help alert for high flux, or to indicate low flux, is important.

The Flux rating is really about significant changes, not minor changes, even though all characters changed will be counted. Refinement of a page or major addition will tend to be a series of actual minor changes (as opposed to those indicated 'minor'). Major changes can be a red flag. Frequent major changes will give a high flux rating, and will indicate significant page instability. Frequent minor changes will indicate page refinement,and will not necessarily affect the flux rating very much, it will amount to background flux.

Potentially, another marker - for change in flux - will indicate when the rate of flux suddenly increases, and may indicate when there is a significant change in the way a page is being edited, and can be a marker for many things.

If vandals were to seek out pages with a low flux rating and vandalise the page. the flux rating will pop up and may alert us to what is happening. A "change in" flux rating will certainly pick it up, since change in flux is activated by edges, and will ignore the background flux.

A flux rating will change when vandalism occurs. Indicators of flux rating will alert administrators of a page being vandalised because they will register an unusually high flux on a page that had previously been stable, one that should normally only be undergoing regular minor changes.


Octothorn 17:14, 10 October 2005 (UTC)

Hide logged in users from Watchlist

Recent changes (WP:RC) already provides the option to "Hide logged in users". Can this same functionality be added to Watchlists? At present, there are nearly 5,000 articles on my watchlist and it would be very useful to hide registered accounts during my endeavors to reverse vandalism on Wikipedia. Hall Monitor 00:03, 12 October 2005 (UTC)

==

Hello, feature request: to see if the english term is also available in other languages. if other lang has the same term (is there a common id?) then show it on the page. this will also help in programs that use wikipedia text but prefer to see it in native language if possible. Thanks, kobi

  1. What if my watchlist remembered that I'd clicked on "show me x hours of changes" and did it by default until I changed it again? Personally, I like mine shorter, and it'd be faster, too. And, assuming that "my watchlist" is a frequently-used feature, this could help reduce server load too. Just an idea. Cheers, Friday 23:54, 12 July 2005 (UTC)
    • Edited and re-posted by Uncle Ed 13:40, July 14, 2005 (UTC)
  1. What if my watchlist showed integers, instead of "You have 203.5 pages on your watchlist"? Friday 06:59, 2 August 2005 (UTC)

See also

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