Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)

The proposals section of the village pump is used to discuss new ideas and proposal that are not policy related (see Wikipedia:Village pump (policy) for that).

Please sign and date your post (by typing ~~~~ or clicking the signature icon in the edit toolbar).

Start a new discussion in the proposals section

 Policy Technical Proposals Idea lab WMF Miscellaneous 

• Table of contents
• First discussion
• End of page
• New post

« Archives, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211, 212, 213, 214, 215, 216, 217, 218

Wikipedia:Requests for image manipulation --- Good or bad idea?

I was thinking of creating Wikipedia:Requests for image manipulation (WP:RFIM for short) as a place to handle requests to modify images. Any thoughts? [[User:Neutrality|Neutrality (talk)]] 20:58, 15 Sep 2004 (UTC)

This was originally one of the things Cleanup was going to be for. Is there any advantage to splitting it away from there? Angela. 21:39, Sep 15, 2004 (UTC)

Things like this get lost on Cleanup, and the Cleanup page doesn't lend itself to discussion of images. [[User:Neutrality|Neutrality (talk)]] 21:41, 15 Sep 2004 (UTC)

I was recently toying with idea of suggesting Wikipedia:Requests for assistance as a general "can someone fix this image/template/table/botched page move/whatever" page, given the number that appear on the pump. Never got around to it, though. Are there enough image manipulation requests to justify it's own page? - 22:01, 15 Sep 2004 (UTC) Lee (talk)

I think the Requests for assistance page is an excellent idea! RickK 00:07, Sep 23, 2004 (UTC)

What will make or break this idea, and also the split of the Village Pump, is whether a sufficient cadre of competent helpers read it and answer the questions posed. I'm not sure I know how to attract such cadre, but that's the trick. I think it's a good idea, but I'm not competent to say how to sell it or what to call it. Andrewa 11:12, 17 Sep 2004 (UTC)

I like the idea, I would add such a page to my watch list so that I might be able to lend help when I'm around. A note that such a page exists on the pump would be helpfull to creating popularity for it. Cavebear42 19:57, 30 Sep 2004 (UTC)

I support this as it is something I, and I am sure many others, would be happy to do to spend a few mindless moments when you don't really want to think. It could also be a page where images are requested such as graphics to be drawn or pictures taken for a purpose. In the graphic manipulation section it could ask specifics of what the person wants done with the graphic, e.g. cropped to xxx or, "It needs to be brighter", or "Can you get rid of the goat on the left and still leave the sheep behind it?" There could be a paragraph or two and some sample images to show what can be done. As for the issue of creating the cadre, put a link to the page on selected pages to do with images, tutorials, and maybe on Village pump, create the page and see who comes looking for help with images and who comes to offer that help. If it falls flat, broaden the advertising. Anyone who takes responsibility for a task should then put their name and timestamp to the task with a projected completion date to prevent duplication of effort. If the job still isn't finished some time after the completion target date then at least you know who to contact to see if they have lost interest or it is too hard so the task can be freed for someone else to take it up.--CloudSurfer 09:05, 15 Oct 2004 (UTC)

There are enough Wikipedians who can handle Photoshop or the Gimp, or any other imaging program at expert level or as a qualified amateur. There will always be someone willing to give a helping hand. Many of the images that I have uploaded, have been treated first with Photoshop, as to brighten or sharpen them. JoJan 18:37, 23 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Idea

How about we do a permanent split (no posting on the main Vil Pump page) and then do something like:

Village Pump -- News

{{Wikipedia:Village Pump (News)}}

Village Pump -- Technical

{{Wikipedia:Village Pump (Technical)}}

and then every heading under the main headings would have an 'add to this discussion' link (like Vfd) and we keep the box with the different village pump links (so we can post). — Ilγαηερ (Tαlκ) 21:01, 18 Sep 2004 (UTC)

• I like this idea. The way it is now, it's sort of confusing whether to post to a subpage or to the main page, and when checking the Village Pump for new stuff, I often just check the main page and I don't bother clicking all of the links to the subpages, thus the posts on the subpages are probably getting less exposure. --Chessphoon 03:25, 21 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Shortcut icons

It would be very helpful if each wiki had a different shortcut icon. For example, with several wikis open in different tabs, they would have a different icon depending on which wiki is in the tab. I have made some for Meta, Wikibooks, and Wikiquote with Fennec's help, and they are here. What do people think of that? And would someone kindly put those icons on the wikis? --Yath 03:13, 20 Sep 2004 (UTC)

I like the idea. — Ilγαηερ (Tαlκ) 00:52, 21 Sep 2004 (UTC)

The following line appears in the HTML for every page served from Wikipedia:

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="/favicon.ico" />

which provides an icon to be used when your system makes a shortcut. (I think Mozilla can use it to decorate tabs as well, although IE seems to be behind in that regard :-) It seems to work in my IE Favourites menu. I don't know whether the other examples in your list already have such an icon: maybe yours coud be used if not? HTH HAND --Phil | Talk 14:59, Sep 22, 2004 (UTC)

The problem is that all wikis in the Wikimedia foundation have the same icon, which is a capital W. I find it useful to have pages from several different wikis open at the same time. All of their tabs have the same icon. If they were different, well, life would be that much nicer. --Yath 03:03, 23 Sep 2004 (UTC)

The logical way would be to add the appropriate language code to say the bottom-right of the Capital-W icon, which would likely be doable even if rather small. I did think of using a flag-type background, but struck out when trying to think which flag you'd use for :en: :-) I would have thought trying to come up with a distinct icon for each and every language wiki would be an impossible task, never mind the confusion of trying to recall which is which on your screen :-) --Phil | Talk 11:53, Sep 23, 2004 (UTC)

I also support this idea. Especially if someone already made icons. JesseW 07:11, 19 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Disclaimer?

I propose adding the following to the bottom of all article:

Disclaimer: All information provided on Wikipedia is presented 'as is'. No warranty is offered, express or implied.

or something like that. — Ilγαηερ (Tαlκ) 01:26, 21 Sep 2004 (UTC)

There is a link to Wikipedia:General disclaimer at the bottom of every page? -- Chuq 01:51, 21 Sep 2004 (UTC)

There is? If not, there should be. If there is, I never noticed it in my 1 1/2 years here. — Ilγαηερ (Tαlκ) 01:25, 22 Sep 2004 (UTC)

It just says, in rather small letters, Disclaimers - which maybe isn't obvious enough. OTOH, a label with a summary of the disclaimers wouldn't actually be any more noticeable, except that it would take up a bit more screen-width, so maybe this is more of a skin-design issue: how can we make it so that people will actually notice our disclaimer link, so that it's useful. - IMSoP 14:33, 22 Sep 2004 (UTC)

the rather small letters is a Monobook innovation. the link used to be/is quite visible in the old skin. --Hemanshu 03:34, 29 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Enabling the instant revert button globally

I have been discussing with Angela the reasons behind disallowing normal users to use the instant revert button. Basically, there is no reason why an administrator can revert a page easily and a normal user is obligued to revert it by force (open > select history > click edit > save as). Angela's concern was that enabling it globally would allow vandals to revert fixes immediatly. However, this is an evitable situation:

We could simply have a timer that disallows simple users to use the revert button. Say that the timer is set for 5 minutes: if I revert a page, I can't use the revert button until 5 minutes have passed (as I'm not an admin, just a simple user). However, an admin is not constrained by this timer: he can use the revert button again and again and again without a time limit — just at it is now.

This can be achieved by comparing the timestamp of the user's last use of the revert() function on a certain page with the timestamp of the server; ie: user used revert() on X article at 14:00:00 09/20/2004 and the timestamp of the server is 16:00:00 09/21/2004: the user is allowed to use the revert() function. —Joseph | Talk 23:34, Sep 21, 2004 (UTC)

Would you also disallow the use of &bot? Because if not, then they can hide their reversions from recent changes (if I understand how &bot works) and vandalism could occur completely unnoticed. --Golbez 23:37, Sep 21, 2004 (UTC)

Very few people should be allowed to bot users, and nobody should ever be able to bot themself. --[[User:Eequor|ηυωρ]] 02:26, 22 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Isn't &bot available to admins only? Why would we disallow it then? —Joseph | Talk 03:46, Sep 22, 2004 (UTC)

I am totally against the idea, and after this timestamp thing I still am really uneasy against it. Sysops are trusted members of the community. If you want to be one, simply petition to be one. If you have done good for wikipedia and people know you, chances are you'll be accepted. — Ilγαηερ (Tαlκ) 01:27, 22 Sep 2004 (UTC)

That's the problem Ilya, I don't want to be a sysop but I want to be able to revert a page without going back to Bedrock. It is absurd to have to revert manually when images themselves can be reverted. I don't understand why the timestamp approach bothers you, it is just that: an approach. There are other ways to do this, I just gave one suggestion for it. —Joseph | Talk 03:46, Sep 22, 2004 (UTC)

This seems reasonable. I'd like to point out that any delay at all would simply discourage malicious users from using the revert mechanism, instead vandalizing manually. Consider that automatic reverts are very clearly marked, while a normal user may use any summary they like and mark their revert a minor edit. Allowing all users to revert, without restriction, should generally be beneficial.

Some fair version of the three-revert rule should be implemented on the server, regardless. I'd suggest placing a limit of four consecutive reverts on a specific article, by any user, possibly comparing subsequent edits to the recent history for further protection. Unless manual reversion is a widespread problem currently, allowing all users to use the automated function would be harmless. --[[User:Eequor|ηυωρ]] 02:23, 22 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Incidentally, are MD5 checksums generated for pages upon editing? That might remove considerable load from comparing previous versions. If not, MD4 would be a better choice, as it's considerably faster (on the other hand, it might just slow the server more, since reverting isn't much of a problem). --[[User:Eequor|ηυωρ]] 02:51, 22 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Considering some of the complaints I've seen on some image talk pages where people were accidentally reverting images, I would have to argue against any instant revert capabilities. For the average user there should always be some type of confirm asking if the user is sure they really want to revert. —Mike 02:39, Sep 22, 2004 (UTC)

A problem with the image pages is that (del), (cur), and (rev) are cryptic (surely there's no reason for chopping the words in half; they're only six characters). If there isn't a confirmation button for reverting, there should be. --[[User:Eequor|ηυωρ]] 02:56, 22 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Mike you said it yourself: ask users before reverting. Something like: "are you sure you want to revert this?" Once he answers yes then proceed to revert. —Joseph | Talk 03:46, Sep 22, 2004 (UTC)

Then why give them the option at all, since that's the same number of clicks required for a regular non-admin revert? It would require recoding Mediawiki, I assume, to add this capability, and not merely a policy change. --Golbez 16:17, Sep 22, 2004 (UTC)

When you revert manually you have to do at least 3 clicks: select the version, click edit, click save. With automatic revert this can be short down to 1 or 2 clicks. The question of reverting could be a user preference: "do you want to be asked before reverting?" or simply "don't ask me again when reverting". —Joseph | Talk 22:41, Sep 22, 2004 (UTC)

I agree. At current server loads, each click means a wait of several seconds. The difference between one and three clicks is quite significant, and I like the idea of making the double-check question optional. The default should perhaps be to ask, so that only people who already know what they're doing can turn it off. Fpahl 09:49, 25 Sep 2004 (UTC)

The revert is intended to eventually mean "this was vandalism". Admins aren't supposed to be using it for normal reverts either. Jamesday 14:41, 26 Sep 2004 (UTC)

I'm against this. A User Interface should make it easy to to the things you want people to do, but it should also make it hard to do the things you don't want them to do. Reverting is one of the things that you want people to think about very hard before they do it. Even as an admin it's sometimes very easy to just push that revert button because you don't like the look of an entry. I have to make myself check it. I confess that sometimes I've even forgotten that 'revert' can undo multiple changes.

Whatever we do revert should not be made available to anons. Imagine the havoc when some newcomer finds they can screw up an article by just pressing one button, and that the summary automatically is filled in to look like it's a sensible change. DJ Clayworth 14:45, 27 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Honestly, I'd rather lose the ability to auto-revert as an admin than hand it out to anyone who feels like signing up for a username. Most of our widespread vandal attacks have been from registered accounts -- imagine if all Wik's vandalbot accounts had the power to auto-revert? DJ's reasoning is perfectly sound: let's not do this. Jwrosenzweig 22:11, 28 Sep 2004 (UTC)

imagine if all Wik's vandalbot accounts had the power to auto-revert That's a silly argument. Bots can revert in one step already anyway. Just set wpEdittime and upload the old text. anthony (see warning) 15:49, 29 Sep 2004 (UTC)

The Accessible Wikipedia

I was just reading what some have said about Wikipedia... like you can now plug a phone line in anywhere in the world and suddenly have a tremendous encyclopedia at your fingertips. (Harold Rhinegold, I think). But, that got me thinking.

There is a large amount of official HTML code that is rarely used and, I would wager, not entirely supported by the major browsers. This code deals mostly with accessibility - web browsing made easy for the blind and immobile.

I was wondering if anything could be done to assist this important segment of the population. I don't know anything about accessibility coding, so some of these questions may seem horribly naive:

• Is the site itself designed with accessibility in mind? i.e. when a blind person navigates to a page, and he has a page reader, does it read off "Main Page, Community Portal, Current Events"... etc. on every page?

• Many articles on here are formatted specifically for visual presentation, but may gum up accessible browsers. Like my congress tables, or any article that begins with a table of information, or what not. Do readers and such bypass these, or do they read every word?

I guess what I'm getting at here is maybe there should be an option for a blind-compatible alternate page in some cases. I don't know, maybe people would have to select that they're blind (or need an accessible copy no matter why) at the front page, or in their login, or maybe just give the option on appropriate pages. Like {{accessible}} could lead you to a more accessible copy of the page, but remain invisible if you are using a normal browser. It almost sounds worthy for an entire other wikipedia (and maybe this IS better suited for simple:, I don't know) but only a small portion of the pages would benefit from this.

Just some rambling thoughts. I'm sure there must be information on the web somewhere about all this. --Golbez 21:46, Sep 22, 2004 (UTC)

This is an important matter and could be discussed and written about endlessly (and often is amongst those of us who design websites). Here's a very brief reply. The site does appear to be designed with accessibility in mind, and a fair bit of thought seems to have gone into the XHTML and CSS used. This sort of thing is best achieved with CSS rather than creating alternate pages, and that's what Wikipedia does. If you view a Wikipedia page with stylesheets disabled, or in a text browser etc., you go straight into the main content and all the "edit this page" stuff is down the bottom out of the way. Consequently if you were to use a voice browser or an embossed braile display, for example, it shouldn't be too much of a mess. There is a problem on Wikipedia with people sticking deprecated HTML into pages to come up with some fancy effect. The evil <font> tag is often spotted. People also frequently fail to give images a good "alt" tag. Tables often pose an accessibility problem, but if well designed there is nothing inherently wrong with them, except that they should only be used when there's a tabular relationship between data, and not for layout purposes. Whether a Wikipedia table is a horrible mess or not varies from case to case. — Trilobite (Talk) 22:03, 22 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Precisely. The MediaWiki developers have done a good job (a really good job!) of producing validating XHTML code with perfect CSS, but we Wikipedians tend to ruin it by forgetting to close tags or adding obsolete ones that the server can't improve. We'll need <span> (see Wikipedia:Span tag poll) and either a bot or an HTML corrector before all the Wikipedia pages truly validate. --Ardonik.talk()^* 00:44, Sep 23, 2004 (UTC)

I voted against span. :) Because I wanted a pure wiki version of it. --Golbez 00:57, Sep 23, 2004 (UTC)

=It seems that this discussion has been inactive for over a week, but as a blind Wikipedian, I would definitely say that this website is accessible. The code makes it easy for my reading software to read the articles and navigate. It also helps that there are no graphical distractions like flash. Of course I cannot access images, but if the image has a name which basically describes what the picture is of, I know what it is about. It is sometimes difficult to learn the codes for editing, particularly for tables, but this is a minor problem which I am overcoming. Academic Challenger 08:28, 2 Oct 2004 (UTC)

WikiPiccy anyone?

I have wanted to add more images to small and medium sized articles.

Could a new Wiki, called WikiPiccy, be created, so that 5, 10 or more images could be uploaded and stored, and then some of them linked into WikiPedia? This would be a pictorial adjunct to WikiPedia.

N12345n 22:13, 2004 Sep 23 (UTC)

That's what m:Wikimedia Commons is aiming to do. The wiki is in its infancy, though. Feel free to help out in any way you can. • Benc • 00:30, 24 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Reference list

Would it be possible to have a numbered reference list show up at the end of the article? For example, some of the more news oriented articles such as John Kerry have lots of citations in the text. These show up as numbered references. It would be nice to also have these show up at the bottom of the page with an actual name (e.g. New York Times Feb 12, 2003) so that one could see at a glance the references used in the article. One could do this by hand, but then the numbers would get thrown off every time a new reference is inserted. I have in mind some template like {reference:nytimes.com|New York Times, Feb 12, 2003} which inserts a numbered link as currently & adds a list to the bottom. Wolfman 22:17, 25 Sep 2004 (UTC)

This feature would involve a change to the MediaWiki software. The software developers generally do not read the village pump, so I'd suggest using the Bugzilla site to submit a feature request. Interesting idea, though I don't know if it would be implemented any time soon (if at all) because it may be more trouble than its worth. • Benc • 23:56, 25 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Thanks much. Unfortunately, however, Bugzilla wants a real email address before it will take an entry. And I don't give my email out. Oh well, I had hoped it could be done with a template or some such. Wolfman 00:20, 26 Sep 2004 (UTC)

http://www.mailinator.com/ will give you a quick throwaway email address. anthony (see warning) 16:06, 29 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Check out my propsed footnote format. You don't actally need numbers on the web. JesseW 06:44, 19 Oct 2004 (UTC)

There has been discussion of solid programmatical approaches to this at meta:Footnotes (and meta:Talk:Footnotes); to my knowledge, it hasn't got far beyond theoretical considerations, but feel free to read and contribute there. - IMSoP 22:12, 27 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Other uses

Article text. ==See also== List of links ==External links== List of links ==Other uses== Alternate meaning 1... Alternate meaning 2... Etc...

I would like to suggest a formatting change where articles have one or more other uses appearing at the bottom. Current convention is to separate it from the preceding article with a horizontal rule, but this isn't the best formatting when dealing with longer articles. The alternate meaning does not show up in the table of contents, and it is easy to overlook a small blurb at the end of the article. Instead I suggest using one of two other methods: 1). Move the alternate meanings to a disambiguation page and include links between that new page and the current page. 2.) Create a new "Other uses" section at the bottom of the page (see example at right). (It would be "Other uses" only because many articles, including the new Template:otheruses, begin with the comment "For other uses, see ...") —Mike 16:56, Sep 26, 2004 (UTC)

People generally won't complain if you move the different meanings to their own page and create a disambiguation page. I find the horizontal rule method annoying too and I generally treat it as a vestage of the days before we figured out how to do disambiguation. anthony (see warning) 16:11, 29 Sep 2004 (UTC)

The Star Trek Project

Star Trek information on Wikipedia can be characterized as mostly "barely okay" with the exception of a few stellar articles. My intention is to vastly increase the quality, quantity, and general goodness of all Star Trek related information. I should say that I am not a Trekkie and so I am not as well informed about all things Star Trek as some of you might be, but I am slowly but surely making improvements to related articles. You can too!

My specialties lie in DS9 and Voyager.

What needs to be done:

• There is a serious lack of episode information. They should be fairly easy to create: everytime you watch a Star Trek episode, get on Wikipedia and create the related article. I tried to make one episode article that could be used as a general guide: In the Pale Moonlight. By all means it isn't perfect or anything, and I encourage you to improve it, but if every episode could be wikified as such, we'd be a long way towards our project goals. Many episodes are refered to in Star Trek articles... this would provide valuable background information. A true encyclopedia.
• Images! There is a veritable infinite number of images that can be used under fair use copyright laws. Star Trek has been churning out images for decades.. Every Star Trek article should have at least one image. Images in some articles are rather weak and should be replaced (ie Bolian).
• And much, much more. There is a large variety of types of articles one could work on, from technology to history to politics to popular culture.

How to get started:

1. Go to United Federation of Planets or Star Trek and start clicking links. Most of them are shallow entries. Star improving them. Add pictures.
2. A great resource is Memory Alpha. All the content there can be taken so long as you provide a link back to the source. Most empty articles here have write-ups there. Take and build upon them.

Go!

Simply put, we need to rekindle my proposed "take-over" of Memory Alpha. Currently, we try to get recent copies of their articles on our site, but that's falling through the cracks ever so quickly. They want to create a definitive guide to Trek, we want to create a definitive guide to the universe. What's to lose? Is there any objections to me contacting them again, and proposing a merger of sorts. -- user:zanimum

I don't oppose a complete take-over of the site, but I doubt they would agree to it. A more realistic option is to take advantage of their wiki-friendly copyright policy and just take articles that are better than ours and integrate them into this site (I have begun doing this.) So long as a link to Memory Alpha is included within the text, it is all perfectly legal. EDGE 22:44, Sep 27, 2004 (UTC)

Note that MA is actually not using a license compatible with Wikipedia, they use the Creative Commons no commercial usage license. Using a non-commercial license is prohibited. -- Solitude 18:20, Sep 28, 2004 (UTC)

Since there already is Memory Alpha, would it not be more profitable to leave documenting Star Trek to them, and work on things that there is actually a shortage of knowledge on? DJ Clayworth 14:38, 27 Sep 2004 (UTC)

I can't say much for your 'template' episode; there's nothing in the first paragraph establishing that (1) we're discussing a TV episode; (2) that the events described are fictional ocurrences. Every article needs to have context established, no matter what it's about or where in the heirarchy it is. As well, the episode description seems to sound more like a review at times; try to keep it NPOV where possible. Radagast 16:25, Sep 27, 2004 (UTC)

I think you're completely right about the context. I will make appropriate corrections. Where, precisely, do you see POV text? Is it the part about it being considered a Star Trek classic? This is widely accepted among Trekkies. Check the Star Trek review websites or even the episode page on Startrek.com itself. If the POV is elsewhere, please list it so I can review your claim. Thanks, EDGE 22:42, Sep 27, 2004 (UTC)

It doesn't seem as POV on second reading; sorry about that criticism. Do please get that context in, as I feel like i'm reading an episode guide and not an article. Radagast 12:02, Sep 28, 2004 (UTC)

Does it look better now? --Phil | Talk 13:47, Sep 28, 2004 (UTC)

It does; I've also put quotes on the episode title and tialicized the name of the program, these are standard formatting. No further objections. Radagast 13:13, Oct 4, 2004 (UTC)

Original broadcast dates would be nice, as would the episode's writer and director. MK 03:55, 17 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Just a note, to expand on Radagast's idea of how the articles should work. I think a good idea when dealing with so-called "fancruft", which many of these articles are is to ensure that the articles are encyclopedic with relation to the real world. That is, each article should explain the significance of its topic to the plots, themes, and effect on the viewer, thus representing it as fiction of a certain significance. No article should just be a book-report, that is not an encyclopedic account of a topic. —siroχo 23:37, Oct 26, 2004 (UTC)

Wikipedia toolbar

I was wondering if a IE/FF based wikipedia toolbar exists. vogon77 05:07, Sep 27, 2004 (UTC)

I suggested this once before, to no response. Hopefully this proposal gets more hearsay. -- user:zanimum

I was actually thinking about that exact same thing a few days ago, I'd like to build a FF extension, but I'm sheer out of time at the moment as I'm doing an internship. If others are interested, we could start up a WikiProject and start writing some requirements. -- Solitude 12:09, Sep 28, 2004 (UTC)

I'm not sure exactly what you are looking for but Mozdev has a Wikipedia search plugin for mozilla firefox at http://mycroft.mozdev.org/download.html - Taxman 22:36, Oct 13, 2004 (UTC)

Headers

Can we have the one-equals headers back for the Pump? Why do they exist at all if we're not supposed to use them? It muchly improves the look of the pump to have the little HRs under each heading, instead of headers floating in space, and this only happens if the section headers are ==, and the major sections are = or ==. But on another question, is there any use for = headers at all? --Golbez 15:59, Sep 28, 2004 (UTC)

Actually no, look at Wikipedia:Village pump, the == headers are used to seperate the sections, === are for topics. -- Solitude 17:46, Sep 28, 2004 (UTC)

But that destroys the usefulness of the "start a new discussion" link, as that creates headings at the == level. -- Cyrius|✎ 23:59, 28 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Genealogy database

I notice several Wikipedia biographies link to my database of pedigrees. (freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~jamesdow) Would there be interest in Wikipedia hosting the entire database? This might have many advantages.

Despite the open (anarchistic?) Wikipedia policies, this is not something I could just start doing myself. For one thing, Wikipedians should help decide the best format.

-- James D. Allen (e-mail: fabpedigree at yahoo or jamesdowallen at gmail.)

We are in the planning stages of developing just such a project. See meta:Wikipeople and meta:talk:Wikipeople. Your data would be most welcome in that project! --mav 18:38, 29 Sep 2004 (UTC)

There are various specialised genealogies out there, which the wikipedia should subsume and improve on. Some of them are now moribund. See, for example, http://sigact.acm.org/genealogy/ (theoretical computer scientists) and http://www.genealogy.ams.org/ (mathematicians). Eoghan 17:53, 30 Sep 2004 (UTC)

T-Shirts/Apparel

We need Wikipedia gear. T-Shirts, Sweatshirts, HOODIES, Hats, etc. They'd help raise money and generate traffic/interest besides just being insanely cool. I'd buy one if good quality items were available; CaféPress sucks, but it's probably the fastest way for this to happen. Anyway, I'm sure you guys can figure out the technicalities. ^__^

Anybody with me?

http://www.cafepress.com/wikipedia But it never has brought in much money at all. --mav 18:36, 29 Sep 2004 (UTC)

That's cool, thanks for showing me. It'd probably do a lot better if you guys used something besides CafePress...they always have real low-quality products. Just iron-ons. Try a place like CustomInk.com and put the links in a prominent place on the site and I think that will help out a lot. I'm not going to buy from CaféPress. !Cookiecaper 05:21, 1 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I propose a 'Wikipedia is my television' or 'Alt-x is my remote control' bumper stickers, I would buy one. Libber

How about, "Real Men/Women Edit Wikipedia"? Or, "Vanity. Delete." Perhaps a little more obscurely, "{{pfd|person={{YOURNAME}}}}". And, of course, "Cabal Member Since (project join date)".

Wiki Syntax for Pronunciation

It would be enormously helpful to have a standardised Wiki syntax for pronunciations (i.e., phonetic transcriptions), in a similar spirit to the way dates are currently treated. Currently, pronunciations (of, for example, place names) are given in a haphazard and unsystematic way using a number of inconsistent systems (International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), SAMPA, X-SAMPA, Kirshenbaum, simplified English phonetics), each with different rationales and opposing intentions, or often just what an author makes up on the spot based on their own accent.

There was a lengthy debate at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (pronunciation) (which I discovered after writing up this proposal) about standardising pronunciation schemes which got nowhere for one fundamental reason: nobody could agree on one system because different people prefer different systems for different (sensible) reasons.

The idea would be to let users enter pronunciation in a number of systems, but that this would be wikified into a single wiki markup, which can then be rendered in various ways.

This is possible since there is a deterministic and straightforward translation between these formats (with the exception that you can only translate into simplified English pronunciation, since it contains less information).

I'm sure many wikipedians would happily weed articles to add the appropriate syntax.

There would be several advantages to this:

1. It would enable people to set a preference for how they prefer to see pronunciations. I, myself, prefer IPA, but some people don't have the necessary fonts so need to use SAMPA, and I'm sure many people would prefer simplified English phonetics.

Most people probably don't care, but this would allow the needs of those who prefer linguistically accurate transcriptions to be met along with those who want something more straightforward.

2. It would lead to more concise articles, since currently people often add pronunciations in more than one system.

3. It would make it easier to actually enter phonetics in the IPA. You could, for example, enter it in the ASCII-based SAMPA system, and after wikification, view it in the IPA. This would be easier than having to figure out the html markup for IPA symbols, and also more meaningful in the source.

4. Standardisation. A pronunciation system should be formalised and centralised in one location, rather than made up in an ad hoc way on an article by article basis. For example, there was a proposal for a simplified phonetic system based on English pronunciation which didn't get anywhere (naturally).

5. Extensibility. In principle, new phonetic systems could be added in future (this is not quite as nerdish as it sounds). Once the framework is up and running, we can add or modify systems, but the point is that this would only need to be done in one central place.

Eoghan 15:57, 30 Sep 2004 (UTC)

There is a system for entering IPA symbols current undergoing testing at Wikisophia. You might be particularly interested in this. HTH HAND --Phil | Talk 17:10, Sep 30, 2004 (UTC)

Cool. This still doesn't allow customisation like I suggested (and therefore will not help IPA-haters), but if tipa was adopted as a wiki syntax standard then we could do that. Eoghan 18:01, 30 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Need admin to help move page

I'd like to move "Thomas Lynch (disambiguation)" to "Thomas Lynch". I moved the previous article under Thomas Lynch to "Thomas Lynch (statesman)"; given that his son (Jr.) was a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and that there are several other notables with the name, I didn't think it was reasonable to conclude he was clearly the best-known. I believe I've moved all the other links/redirects correctly. MisfitToys 21:09, Sep 30, 2004 (UTC)

Done and done. :) (I wikied the names in your comment so I could leap to them easily) --Golbez 21:25, Sep 30, 2004 (UTC)

Many thanks! MisfitToys 22:13, Sep 30, 2004 (UTC)

If someone could move Raven-Symone (longer article, incorrect spelling) to Raven-Symoné (stub, correct spelling), that would be swell. (Not that I'm a fan; I just can't stand incorrect article titles...) —tregoweth 02:16, Oct 13, 2004 (UTC)

Done -- Chris 73 Talk 02:21, Oct 13, 2004 (UTC)

Category maintainers

I propose a "category maintainer" (feel free to suggest a better title) system. A person who is a maintainer of a category would basically have the job of caring for the articles in that category. There should be nothing formal or any obligation about this position; on the top of each category's talk page, there should be a box with a list of people have signed up to be maintainers for the category, and people should be able to simply add themselves at their own will there, at any time.

The only requirement for being a category maintainer would be having all pages in the category on one's watchlist (including articles in subcategories if the category sub-tree is manageable in size) to check for vandalism etc. This could solve our current problem of not knowing which pages are monitored sufficiently.

Though not necessary, a person who signs up for the position should be knowledgeable in the field. This is of course necessary for catching vandalism of the subtle kind. Additionally, instead of asking about esoteric topics at the help desk and hoping for someone who can answer to stroll by, we could look up the people who maintain the category on the topic and ask them. It would also give us a better overview of how much expertise we have in the respective areas of knowledge covered in Wikipedia.

Fredrik | talk 15:30, 1 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I am sure something like that is already happening inofficially - those interested in a field of knowledge monitor the related articles already, most commonly by watchlist. Categories aren't that handy for that task yet - often there are many small sub-categories, thus many single category pages to monitor. Maybe that will become better once it's possible to get all pages in a category including all subcategories listed at once. Yet in case the vandal removes the category tag the article will be no longer present in the category, and thus you won't see the vandalism anymore - and page blanking is still a popular way of vandalism. Another way I use for monitoring the changes in topics related to Thailand is the List of Thailand related topics, the link "Related changes" shows all the latest edits. However unlike categories that list have to be maintained manually. andy 12:51, 3 Oct 2004 (UTC)

It would not let you see the removal of the category tag, but for other edits: An additional "related changes" function for the categorized articles. This way it would work like a manually maintained list. --SirJective 19:19, 3 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Why not make this an optional thing for WikiProjects to do? Ideally, every article category should be covered by at least one WikiProject. • Benc • 20:17, 9 Oct 2004 (UTC)

This has tie-in with the auto-generated special interest groups idea that I've posted further down the page. I was thinking that these Special Interest Groups might serve as administrative divisions, but I was waiting to see reactions to the general idea first before adding that complication. The Special Interest Groups and Categories wouldn't be one-to-one, but the effect would be the same. crazyeddie 21:55, 24 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Cardiomelanosis

There is no listing in Wikipedia for this condition. It must be rare; I've worked in the medical field for 23 years and have never heard it, but it is in the medical dictionaries. They don't specify what it means, however. Gawaine --172.128.85.138 11:45, 2 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Added to Wikipedia:Requested articles/Applied arts and sciences#Health Science. -- Paddu 20:37, 28 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Common Images

I sugges a language wikipedia (i.e. spanish) can use the images stored in another one (i.e. the english Wikipedia).

This is very important to spare space and use common images.

I suggest use in the spanish wikipedia [[En:Image:ImageName]] to display an image from the english Wikipedia.

Hopefully soon it will be possible to use images from http://commons.wikipedia.org, which will then be the prime place for free images which are not language-dependend - so you are not the first one who suggested that one, commons has been in discussion for more than 6 months already and is online, but not yet usable from the wikipedias. The reason why it isn't possible to refer to images from any other language wikipedia is the fact that it should be possible to download a complete language edition without the need to crawl through many other wikis to have the images needed. andy 12:43, 3 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Parenthesis articles without disambiguation page

At the german WP, I created (following someone elses idea) a list of articles whose title has parenthesis, like "name (topic)", for which there is no article with the stripped title "name". The german list is here. I could create such a list for the english WP (it will contain 4000 articles). At the german WP the list is considered useful for creating missing disambiguation pages or removing the parenthesis where it is not needed.

demo list removed, please see the full list

So what do you think about such a list? --SirJective 19:03, 3 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Useful. [...] —Morven

Then I will soon upload a new list. Any suggestions about the title? SirJective

I uploaded the parenthesis list as User:SirJective/Parenthesis. SirJective

Careful with the USS articles. The parens are the ship hull number and the proper title of the ship. Yes, they eventually should have index pages for the numerous ships that carry the same name. A strict removal of the paren is not a good idea in this case. Not a complaint, just a note of caution. Jinian 15:40, 10 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Jinian, you're right. --SirJective 20:44, 10 Oct 2004 (UTC)

From now on please use User_talk:SirJective/Parenthesis for discussion of articles that should be handled carefully. --SirJective 20:44, 10 Oct 2004 (UTC)

"city, state" without "city"

(I split up the discussion, since we are now talking about a slightly different topic. SirJective)

[...] Another such list that would be useful would be to take the <city>, <state> US placename format and find all those for which the base <city> article does not exist. —Morven

It should be quite easy for me to tweak my program so that it finds article "XXX, YYY" without article "XXX". The decision if it's a city could then be made manually, and perhaps by adding certain criterions to the search (I will first check how many such articles exist). Any suggestions how such a list should be called?

Addition: I found a total of 42000 such articles, thereof at most 30000 ending with a U.S. State name (in the form "AL" or "Alabama"). The search is not yet working as expected, but there will be lots of such articles. --SirJective 10:36, 5 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Is here a dedicated page to ask for the semiautomatic creation of special lists (e.g. using SQL statements), or is the village pump used for that? And another question to the sysops: Is the Special:Asksql function deactivated here too (at de: it seems to be)? --SirJective 13:50, 4 Oct 2004 (UTC)

My impression is that this kind of report is best produced from a downloaded copy of the database. User:Topbanana sems to specialise in this kind of thing and has created Wikipedia:Offline reports which is probably helpful to you. HTH HAND --Phil | Talk 11:58, Oct 5, 2004 (UTC)

Phil, thank you for your information. At de: we have de:Wikipedia:Datenbank-Abfragen where on the talk page one can request lists of articles meeting certain criteria and someone (lately me) will create and perform the request and upload the result. I liked to offer my help here :-) --SirJective 11:15, 6 Oct 2004 (UTC)

The city list contains 28000 titles of the form "xxx, yyy" where "xxx" and "yyy" contain no ", " and "yyy" is one of the 50 U.S. state names in both forms "Alabama" or "AL". Additionally there are 5000 titles where "xxx" contains ", " itself, most of them are like Abington Township, Lackawanna County, Pennsylvania, where there is no Abington Township. Should I upload these too?

In that latter case, the check would actually be whether there was an article for Lackawanna County, Pennsylvania, the "containing entity" (in this case there is). HTH HAND --Phil | Talk 12:58, Oct 6, 2004 (UTC)

I'm not sure I understand this--ideally, there should also be a redirect or disambiguation page at least at Abington Township, Pennsylvania. With so many locales in the U.S. (and with many already criticizing the huge number of articles about obscure places in the U.S.), I'm not sure if there is much value to having redirects or disambigs for every unqualified locale name (e.g., Abington Township). (Phil | Talk pp) User:Bkonrad

Sorry, I got confused again. Given an article named "town, county, state", as quoted above, if there is another similar article with "town" and "state" the same but with different "county", there probably ought to be an article named "town, state" listing all the towns with that name in that state. What (whoever the heck that was, oh it was User:Bkonrad, I'll take the liberty of signing it) is saying is that having an article named simply "town", and listing all the towns with that name in the entire US, is probably not helpful. HTH HAND --Phil | Talk 14:18, Oct 6, 2004 (UTC)

Precisely, sorry about forgetting to sign. older≠wiser 15:07, Oct 6, 2004 (UTC)

Let's unravel this...

• I created a list of "city, state" and am waiting for suggestions on the title of that list.

• Articles of the form "town, county, state" should have:
  1. always an article "county, state"
  2. in case of multiple countys an article "town, state"
  3. unless otherwise useful no article "town"

So my second list covers exactly the third, nonwanted case *g* I'll go check on the first case. --SirJective 14:44, 6 Oct 2004 (UTC)

1) Yes, there should always exist a "County, State" for any article of the form "Town, County, State"

2) I think yes. For cases such as "Town, County1, State" and "Town, County2, State", there should always be an article of the form "Town, State"

3) Let me check on something here--If there are articles such as "Town, State1" and "Town, State2", there generally should be a disambiguation page "Town" for these. However, there is not, as a rule, articles of the form "Town" corresponding to every single "Town, State" article.

older≠wiser 15:07, Oct 6, 2004 (UTC)

I use "city" and "town" synonymously for the purpose of this discussion, I hope that's OK with all of you. So the "city, state" list will also find "Town, State1" and "Town, State2", and due to the lack of proper distinction also "Town, State1" without "Town, State2", as long as there is no "Town". The decision which articles should be created would therefore be left to the ones who work with the list. --SirJective 16:11, 6 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I upload a part of the list for you to look over it, as User:SirJective/tmp_a. Please find a good name for the list. --SirJective 17:05, 6 Oct 2004 (UTC)

This looks interesting. As for a name, how about User:SirJective/U.S. cities lacking redirects? About the report itself--two things:

1. Many of the items listed appear be cases with two entries, such as "City, ST" and "City, State", where ST is the two letter abbreviation for State. The "City, ST" entry should always a redirect to "City, State", so if possible, it would be helpful to eliminate pairs where ST is same as State. What might be of some value to identify if there are any cases where there is an article (not a redirect) at "City, ST" and also at the equivalent "City, State".
2. Thanks to Rambot, there are a lot of anomalous parenthetical disambiguations for U.S. cities. Thus there are a lot of instances such as "Place (City), State" and "Place (Town), State", with similar variations for CDPs and Villages. This can be quite confusing. Basically, we would never want anything at simply "Place (City)" or "Place (Town)". What might be helpful is to ignore the parenthesis after the Place name. So, for example, if there are articles of the form "Place (City), State" and "Place (Town), State" there should be something at "Place, State". Where this really gets messy, is that titles of the form "Place, County, State" should also figure in the comparison.

older≠wiser 14:55, Oct 7, 2004 (UTC)

Some of them need redirects, and some of them need disambiguation. So let's hold this title as a candidate.

I hope I can manage to automatically identify pairs "City, ST" / "City, State". Then I can check wether "City, ST" is a redirect to the article "City, State", and in this case suppess "City, ST" and otherwise add a remark to the entry.

It should be much easier to implement the removal of the parenthesis from "Adams (town), New York" to get Adams. BTW: That page also links to many "Adams Township". Sould there be a separate article Adams Township?

--SirJective 15:27, 7 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Re: Adams Township -- I don't think it would be of great value, but it might be of some interest. Townships are minor civil divisions of a county. Even people who live in them are not always aware of what township they live in, and references to a township are almost always in the context of a county and state, so there is likely little value in making a general disambiguation page for them beyond the state level. However, within a state, there can be confusion between multiple townships and a city or village with the same name--so a Township disambig page at the state level is useful. In cases where there is a multi-state (or multi-country) disambig page for a place name, sometimes townships are also included, just for completeness. older≠wiser 15:58, Oct 7, 2004 (UTC)

That depends on what state. In New England, townships are more important than counties. Even in New York they are pretty important. Offhand, I don't think any of the West Coast states even have them. Township (United States) is currently a stub, could certainly use serious work. -- Jmabel 19:20, Oct 7, 2004 (UTC)

Aren't they called "Towns" in New York and New England? They are all those articles with "Place (town), State". While both terms have been used historically somewhat interchangeably, it seems that New York and New England settled on "Town" for an official designation, while Pennsylvania and midwestern states (except Wisconsin) settled on "Township" as the official designation. I quite agree that Towns are important designations in New England. I'm not so sure about New York, but Wisconsin uses Town in much the same way that other midwest states use Township. Beyond the midwest, Towns/Townships were surveyed, but were generally not used as civil divisions of government. Even in some midwestern states, there may be named townships used for Census statitistical purposes, but they are not organized units of government. Also, I'm not saying that townships in midwestern states are unimportant--its just that they are not nearly as distinct as incorporated municipalities like cities or villages. The townships provide important governmental functions in Michigan, especially in rural areas, but still, many people couldn't tell you what township they're in--while it would be extremely rare to find someone who did not know what city or village they lived in. older≠wiser 19:32, Oct 7, 2004 (UTC)

I upload another demo list, User:SirJective/tmp_b, which contains

• "city, state" articles without "city, ST" or vice versa,
• redirects "city, state",
• non-redirects "city, ST"
• redirects "city, ST" not linking to "city, state".

All this for the state of Alabama. I did not put all "city, state" without "city" into this list (I have now put it in), but some of them are nevertheless listed due to the other criteria.

I think, the title "U.S. cities lacking redirects" fits more to this list :-) --SirJective 19:01, 8 Oct 2004 (UTC)

tmp b is now almost done. All remaining red-links are handled at a different capitalization, except for two--I haven't mustered the courage to tackle disambs for Margaret and Theodore. I don't think all 150-200 people named Margaret and 100+ people named Theodore need to be listed, but the older ones that are like Margaret the whatsit, and Theodore of whereever probably should be. Oh, and Union probably needs stuff added to the list. Niteowlneils 02:55, 30 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Thanks. There's so much to do that I think you won't have to create the pages strictly alphabetically :-) Some temporary gaps are IMHO acceptable.

I will continue uploading the list as soon as I have rewritten my (unfortunaly lost) program. --SirJective 11:52, 30 Oct 2004 (UTC)

The list User:SirJective/tmp_a now contains the same type of list as tmp_b, but for all 50 states and all titles starting with "A - Am". Is it now in a format you can work with? --SirJective 11:56, 9 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Wikipedia:External links

The somewhat delayed Wikipedia:External links/temp seems to be ready to be adopted as a set of guidelines for including external links (and replace its parent page). I don't know if I should bring it to a vote or anything yet. Maybe a few people should give the page a once-over and then we'll decide if its ready. —siroχo 21:35, Oct 3, 2004 (UTC)

CROSSBOW / Systemic bias

User:Xed, the creator of CROSSBOW, a project to eliminate Wikipedia's systemic bias, has apparently decided to leave Wikipedia indefinitely. Since I didn't want his excellent work to go to waste, I moved his project page (by request) to Wikipedia:CROSSBOW. Those involved should figure out what to do next. [[User:Poccil|Peter O. (Talk)]] 02:42, Oct 4, 2004 (UTC)

I'm back in on this. As some of you know, I thought this was generally a good idea, but wasn't happy with where Xed was taking it and decided I'd do best to stay out of his way. I've taken the liberty of starting two QuickPolls at Wikipedia:CROSSBOW to try to get consensus on where we should go from here:

• Poll 1: whether to make this a Wikiproject, just maintain a tasklist, or do something else
• Poll 2: what to call it.

Anyway, I'm ready to give some serious effort to this thing; I've rejoined and I hope some others will sign up as well. -- Jmabel 03:27, Oct 4, 2004 (UTC)

You could do worse than start by changing its name. Using a weapon as a name of a project is, at best, a little unfortunate. --Tagishsimon

Agreed; it will be Wikipedia:WikiProject countering systemic bias. We're still hammering out a few details, but it should be ready to go "live" in about another day. -- Jmabel 00:35, Oct 6, 2004 (UTC)

Just to bring everyone up to date, he's back, the project is Wikipedia:WikiProject Countering systemic bias, and it's launched. -- Jmabel 21:23, Oct 8, 2004 (UTC)

Associative Wiktionary

See wiktionary:Wiktionary:Beer parlour#Associative Wiktionary. [[User:Poccil|Peter O. (Talk)]] 16:45, Oct 5, 2004 (UTC)

September 11

There is a proposal to move September 11, 2001 attacks to a new location. Talk:September 11, 2001 attacks currently has a poll/vote on the following names:

• September 11, 2001 attacks
• September 11, 2001, attacks
• 9/11
• September 11 attacks
• September 11th attacks
• Attacks of September 11, 2001

Feel free to express your preference(s) and help with any decision to move or not move the page.

zoney ♣ talk 13:16, 7 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Easter Eggs

I have just run across my first easter egg hiden in the Wikipedia. I wanted to report it like on WP:-) but it was neither in bad taste or incorrect. Someone had used the colours #fff666 and #ffdead as ligitamate hex colours for a table. I want to mention it somewhere, like Wikipedia:Easter Eggs. However the aforementioned page does not exist. Should I make it for one easter egg? --[[User:Sunborn|metta, The Sunborn ☸]] 19:56, 8 Oct 2004 (UTC)

#ffdead is very common. Happens to be an often appropriate color and easily remembered. I use it often. You'll find it all over the Internet, if you look. -- Jmabel 21:21, Oct 8, 2004 (UTC)

It's probably originally from the X11 color "NavajoWhite". Goplat 23:07, 9 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Limit moving to admins

The Portal is fun at the moment. Folks seem to be working on it, and that makes me happy, cuz I had no clue how to fix it. Someone moved it, possibly multiple times, to .. oddly named pages.

We don't let normal users delete pages. Why do we let them move pages? Ponder what it takes.

1. To fix a deletion, you merely undelete. Right?
2. To fix a move of this caliber, you seem to have to contact a dev.

We don't allow normal users to delete, so why do we allow them to move pages? I have no problem with creaing a "Requests for move" page, but this kind of activity could be absolutely destructive to the pedia.

I propose we limit access to "Move" to admins and above only.

--Golbez 08:51, Oct 9, 2004 (UTC)

Yes, it seems some of the more persistant vandals discovered they can create more harm by moving a page than by simply vandalizing its content. I wouldn't go as far as prohibit moving for normal users completely, as that will only create many cut-and-copy moves with the inherent loss of editing history - but what we could need would be a move-protection, so we can prevent the malicious moving of those pages which create most harm. Especiall user pages should be move-protected by default, which would avoid vandals moving a user page to an insulting name. andy

and/or

1. allow users to move-protect pages in their own user area (but probably not their user talk area), so only an administrator can move it. (To move it yourself, if you are not an admin, you would unprotect it).
2. work out an easier way for admins to undo a move

I'm not sure I see the best answer to all of this, but I'd love to see a good worked-through idea. -- Jmabel 19:33, Oct 9, 2004 (UTC)

For an unrelated reason, a Wikipedia:Requested moves page is currently in the works. See: Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#requested moves -- policy change? • Benc • 20:21, 9 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Category:Featured articles

I think a featured article and a featured article candidates category would both be very useful, and lessen the need for the big long (and about to become bigger and bigger...). It would also be very handy as an index. Do I need to gather community support to do this or should I just go ahead and do this? JOHN COLLISON | (Ludraman) 23:29, 9 Oct 2004 (UTC)

They already exist at:

• Category:Wikipedia featured articles
• Category:Wikipedia featured article candidates
• Category:Wikipedia featured article candidates (contested)

Wikipedia:Featured articles exists to keep track of which articles have already been featured on the main page, format the category nicely, etc. (This page should still continue to exist until and unless the chief FA maintainers (i.e., Raul654) decide that switching over to categories would reduce their workloads, not increase them.) • Benc • 04:31, 10 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Annoying Links

Ok, I'm new to Wikipedia, but I feel compelled to note that most Wikipedia articles are entirely covered with distracting and unnecessary links..

I mean, it's generally pretty obvious which keywords might have articles associated with them. If I'm reading an article about Abraham Lincoln, do I really *need* to have blue underlined links to terms like "Illinois" or "Chicago"? Why?

Wouldn't anyone interested in a term from an article be able to use the search box and look it up?

At the very least, there should be an option to turn links off, or go to a "printable" version of the article that's not such a mess to look at or print.

If I want to print an article for use in a class, for example, I shouldn't have to go into word and manually edit out fifty pointless links.

If there is already a way to get to a clean article, free from distracting underlining, please let me know. Otherwise, I suggest that implementing a way to toggle off distracting links would be a significant enhancement to Wikipedia's functionality, and I strongly recommend it.

TF

A browser that properly supports CSS will automatically apply Wikipedia's "print" stylesheet when you try to print. Among other things, it turns off link underlining. It also removes the navigational elements that aren't useful on paper.

As to having the links in the browser-viewable version, we like it that way. It allows for easy navigation to articles on the topic, and enables the use of the "What links here" function. -- Cyrius|✎ 04:13, 11 Oct 2004 (UTC)

There ought to be a link to the printable version of a page, on the sidebar. [[User:Poccil|Peter O. (Talk)]] 04:31, Oct 11, 2004 (UTC)

• Firstly Among other reasons, the links show that an article exists and the correct way of spelling it and helps duplucation of several articles on the same thing with different spellings. It is also a much more expedient way of browsing related aticles or being prompted that there is one.
• Secondly It helps with random reading. Traditional Enyclopedias often taught what the reader stumbled accross without looking up and this draws one to do this on Wikipedia
• Thirdly How did you survive in a precomputing age library? Editing the text of something that is already prepared by other people is hardly that onerous. Furthermore if it is for class, how about doing it in your own words you lazy little turd!

An old grumpy fart

I assumed TF was a teacher, and wanted to copy and distribute the text of one of our articles to his or her class. Paul August 18:13, Oct 16, 2004 (UTC)

Even more reason for me to despair about the youth of today when they have teachers like that grumble grumble.....Still an old grumpy fart

Generally links are one of the great things about an online encyclopedia. There are many benefits as Cyrius and Dainamo mentioned above. Experienced Wikipedians take them for granted and couldn't live without them. However there can be too many links (see: Wikipedia:Make only links relevant to the context), it's a judgment call, and editors disagree about specific cases. Paul August 18:13, Oct 16, 2004 (UTC)

Agree with Paul, it's possible to overdo it, but the vast majority of articles I've seen seem to strike a good balance. One more thing -- if you create an account, you can also create your own user stylesheet at User:Username/monobook.css. See m:User Styles for information on how to do so; copying the relevant sections of the global "print" stylesheet (anyone know the proper name of it?) into your user stylesheet should remove all visible links from your (and only your) viewing experience. Catherine | talk 23:15, 25 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Judging mainly by filenames, I'd guess the styles applied when printing come from commonPrint.css and/or wikiprintable.css - IMSoP 21:29, 28 Oct 2004 (UTC)

US cities without articles

Every so often, I run across a US city that apparently has no article. This could be for various reasons, including that the Census Bureau uses quirky definitions of what qualifies, spelling issues, town no longer exists, etc... Next time I see one, I'm going to make a list of such towns so that they can be redirected/written/fixed by someone who knows the area and can determine what can be meant. I'm just leaving this here because I can't remember where I've seen any such links. If someone else does, I suggest using the title Wikipedia:US cities without articles; change the title if you prefer, just please leave a note on my talk page. Tuf-Kat 04:16, Oct 11, 2004 (UTC)

One I've found is Milwaukee, Oregon. [[User:Poccil|Peter O. (Talk)]] 04:27, Oct 11, 2004 (UTC) It was just a misspelled version of Milwaukie, Oregon. [[User:Poccil|Peter O. (Talk)]] 04:56, Oct 11, 2004 (UTC)

Often the quirky reason is that the city is unincorporated and therefore doesn't exist as an actual legal entity. -- Cyrius|✎ 05:40, 11 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Indeed, the Census Bureau data identifies every incorporated municipality as of 2000. However, articles may not be where expected because of ambiguity in naming (or alternative spellings). I'll grant that there may be cases where the Census Bureau got it wrong, but I suspect these are few and far between. The more likely explanation for "missing" localities is that they are unincorporated, which means the Census Bureau includes them within a larger surrounding entity. If and/or when you create articles for such "missing" localities, please do not use names such as "city" , "town", or "village" which indicate legally incorporated municipalities. older≠wiser 13:04, Oct 11, 2004 (UTC)

The Census Bereau does list some unincorporated populated places, and the Geographic Names Information System [1] lists a whole bunch more. The GNIS list of populated places is available at http://geonames.usgs.gov/stategaz/POP_PLACES_DECI.TXT. One could take the list at Wikipedia:US cities without articles and then match it up with that list, and for all the matches you'd have the latitude and longitude which could then be run against the polygon data for the census list [2] to find the containing location. However, I'd argue against creating a redirect, because that would discourage actual articles on these populated places from being created. If you want more information on this or can provide me with more, leave a message on my talk page, because there's a good chance I'll miss it if you just leave it here. anthony (see warning) 18:09, 19 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Yes, the census does include some unincorporated places. My comment concerned this section's heading "US cities without articles" and the comment about "unincorporated" cities, which is something of an oxymoron. Of the supposed "cities" on Wikipedia:US cities without articles, nearly all of these are in fact unincorporated. I don't know of anywhere in the U.S. where cities are unincorporated. There are many populated places that are unincorporated, but they are not cities. Also, before anyone gets any ideas about automatically creating articles based on the USGS list of populated places, be EXTREMELY cautious--the list includes many "places" that are nothing more than a road-crossing and a few houses--certainly not much to write about in an article. Unlike Anthony, I would STRONGLY encourage these places to be redirects to the containing locations which could easily contain the few lines of information that the majority of these would consist of. For those places where someone has enough information to write more than a few lines, the redirect can easily be converted into an article. older≠wiser 19:03, Oct 19, 2004 (UTC)

My comment concerned this section's heading "US cities without articles" and the comment about "unincorporated" cities, which is something of an oxymoron. The term city is commonly used to refer to unincoporated populated places. In fact, according to dictionary.com [3], this is the more common use of the term. Also, before anyone gets any ideas about automatically creating articles based on the USGS list of populated places, be EXTREMELY cautious--the list includes many "places" that are nothing more than a road-crossing and a few houses--certainly not much to write about in an article. The incorporated places and census designated places for which we already have articles are also not much to write about in an article, but we have a consensus that they should be written about anyway. anthony (see warning) 19:31, 19 Oct 2004 (UTC)

In the U.S., cities are a specific type of incorporated municipality. The term is sometimes used informally to refer to large urban population centers regardless of municipal status. Even so, I suspect that there are extremely few entries on Wikipedia:US cities without articles that most people would refer to as a city--more likely they'd be called "towns" or "villages". BTW, the dictionary you cite does not specifically say that city is "commonly used to refer to unincoporated populated places" it simply makes no mention of incorporation status. The first entry, which I presume you mean as being the "most common use" says "A center of population, commerce, and culture; a town of significant size and importance", which I would argue would most definitely not apply to most of the unincorporated places on that list. The incorporated places and census designated places for which we already have articles are also not much to write about in an article, but we have a consensus that they should be written about anyway. There is a distinction between having an article with rambot-generated census data (which at least has some semblance of "thereness") vs. an article about an unincorporated place with nothing but the latitude/longitude and the enclosing state/county/township (which I'd consider worthless substubs). I think it is preferable to use redirects and place information about such unincorporated communities within articles about the enclosing entity, that is, to provide some context, rather than to produce yet more substubs that will likely never be expanded. If and when someone has more to say about one of these places, it is simple to replace the redirect with a more substantial article. older≠wiser 20:12, Oct 19, 2004 (UTC)

In the U.S., cities are a specific type of incorporated municipality. That is just your definition, and by no means reflects a consensus among Americans. The term is sometimes used informally to refer to large urban population centers regardless of municipal status. It's also used both formally and informally to represent any populated place important enough to have a zip code. Hence, when you fill out a document, and it asks you "city, state, zip", you don't put "but I don't live in a city", you put the name of your city, no matter how big it is. There is a distinction between having an article with rambot-generated census data (which at least has some semblance of "thereness") vs. an article about an unincorporated place with nothing but the latitude/longitude and the enclosing state/county/township (which I'd consider worthless substubs). I never suggest that we have articles about unincorporated places with nothing but the latitude/longitude and the enclosing state/county/township. The fact of the matter is we already have rambot articles on unincorporated places. For instance, Oak Valley, New Jersey is an unincorporated section of Deptford Township, New Jersey. Turnersville, New Jersey is an unincorporated section of Washington Township, Gloucester County, New Jersey. I'm sure there are thousands of other examples, because these are two just from the County where I happened to grow up. Now I agree with you that we shouldn't be automatically creating substubs. In fact, I would oppose rambot if it applied to be a bot today. I don't like the rambot articles. I think they put a bunch of useless information into an article which hinders the likelihood of the article becoming a well designed useful source of information in the future. But I would also oppose a bot which creates thousands of redirects for unincorporated populated places. And I would oppose someone systematically going through these places and manually adding redirects. I think it is preferable to use redirects and place information about such unincorporated communities within articles about the enclosing entity, that is, to provide some context, rather than to produce yet more substubs that will likely never be expanded. I think we should leave these blank until someone decides to fill them in with more than just a substub. Mention them in the parent entry, and leave the link red until someone stumbles upon it and is willing to manually create an article on it. anthony (see warning) 13:13, 21 Oct 2004 (UTC)

That is just your definition, and by no means reflects a consensus among Americans. It is by no means "just my definition". It is in fact the #2 definition listed in the very dictionary that you cited. And it is a fact, not my opinion. I am not saying that that is the only use of the word--however, it is a very common use of the word, despite your intransigence. The fact of the matter is we already have rambot articles on unincorporated places. I never said that we don't or that we shouldn't have any articles about unicorporated places. But I would also oppose a bot which creates thousands of redirects for unincorporated populated places. I agree with you about this (and also that the general structure of the rambot articles is unsatisfactory). I would not want there to be automatic redirects without some indication in the article as to why the redirect goes there. And I would oppose someone systematically going through these places and manually adding redirects. Here I disagree with you. A redirect to an article which explains why the redirect goes there is, IMO, preferable to either nothing at all (red links) or to a stub with limited prospect for expansion. For example, Bark River and Schaffer are both tiny communities with little liklihood of expansion. Yet, they are localities that can be found on road atlases and Bark River is listed on List of cities, villages, and townships in Michigan (which was derived from a listing of localities on the Michigan state government web site). Both currently redirect to Bark River Township, Michigan, which mentions both places with a brief description. If someone should ever have more to say about either, place, it would be relatively simple to replace the redirect (and hopefully link to it in the township article). In contrast, Tuscarora Township, Michigan, mentions Burt Lake, Michigan in the same way, but also includes a link to the Indian River, Michigan CDP rambot article. Another example, Paradise, Michigan is an unincorporated place where there is already something marginally interesting to say about it that is worth an article apart from Whitefish Township, Michigan. I think we should leave these blank until someone decides to fill them in with more than just a substub. Mention them in the parent entry, and leave the link red until someone stumbles upon it and is willing to manually create an article on it. I disagree, but I don't really think there's much point to arguing about it. I see the red links and I want to know something about the place and rather than create an unlikely-to-be-expanded-anytime-soon-or-maybe-not-ever stub, I prefer to place the information where there is some context for it. BTW, I would suggest that Oak Valley, New Jersey and Turnersville, New Jersey should be edited to clarify that they are census-designated places and not "towns" in any official sense. older≠wiser 15:51, Oct 21, 2004 (UTC)

I am not saying that that is the only use of the word--however, it is a very common use of the word, despite your intransigence. I never denied that it is a common use of the word. However, calling unincorporated populated places cities is very common too. A redirect to an article which explains why the redirect goes there is, IMO, preferable to either nothing at all (red links) or to a stub with limited prospect for expansion. I don't think that's necessarily the case. I think sometimes a red link is preferable to a redirect. This is especially true when a redirect is rather arbitrary. You have listed some situations where it might make sense, but I don't think we should systematically go in and change all of them. BTW, I would suggest that Oak Valley, New Jersey and Turnersville, New Jersey should be edited to clarify that they are census-designated places and not "towns" in any official sense. I'd like to see a definition of what is and is not a "town", then (as well as what is and is not considered incorporated). Because, while I understand where you're coming from trying to restrict the use of the term "city" I've never heard of such a restriction on the term "town". According to town, In the United States of America, the meaning of the term town varies from state to state. In some states, a town is an incorporated municipality, that is, one with a charter received from the state, similar to a city. Typically, municipalities are classed as cities, towns, or villages in decreasing order of size, although not all states have all three. Many states do not use the term "town" for incoporated municipalities. In some states, for example Wisconsin, "town" is used in the same way that civil township is used in elsewhere. In other states, such as Michigan, the term "town" has no official meaning and is simply used informally to refer to a populated place, whether incorporated or not.. According to unincorporated, an unincorporated town is usually not subject to or taxed by a city government. I don't know what basis the census department had for calling Oak Valley a town, but as the original rambot page used that term I assume it did so. And I can tell you without a doubt that Oak Valley is part of Deptford Township. Maybe they used to be separate and then they merged? Would this qualify as a town? anthony (see warning) 18:30, 21 Oct 2004 (UTC)

[4]. No, it doesn't seem Oak Valley was ever incorporated. I'd still like to see documentation as to how that makes it not a "town", though. anthony (see warning) 18:33, 21 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I don't think we should systematically go in and change all of them. OK, but I think we may be working with different understandings of "sytematically". One of my ongoing projects is to "systematically" work through the entire List of cities, villages, and townships in Michigan and make sure there is "something" there for everything, whether it is a separate article or a redirect. I do not plan to do it mechanistically--but do a bit of research and exercise discretion about whether to create an article or a redirect. I think sometimes a red link is preferable to a redirect. I disagree, provided that the redirected article contains an indication as to why the redirect is appropriate. I would rather be able to learn something from an appropriate redirect with an explanation than not learn anything useful from a red link. I'd like to see a definition of what is and is not a "town" Good luck with that--I think it is one of the most ambiguous terms for human settlements around. BTW, I think you may have misunderstood me. I wasn't suggesting that the NJ CDPs should NOT be characterized as towns (although I prefer the less ambiguous term "unincorporated community" or simply "community"), just that the situation be clarified to indicate that they do not have any legal status as organized municipalities. The term "town" did not come from the Census Bureau, which refers to them as CDPs. Rambot used town to describe CDPS, which, IMO, was one of the biggest failures of Rambot and has been the cause of considerable confusion. older≠wiser 19:09, Oct 21, 2004 (UTC)

One of my ongoing projects is to "systematically" work through the entire List of cities, villages, and townships in Michigan and make sure there is "something" there for everything, whether it is a separate article or a redirect. I do not plan to do it mechanistically--but do a bit of research and exercise discretion about whether to create an article or a redirect. I guess that's fine. My main concern was that we'd be creating redirects out of laziness, because we know that the place is part of a larger place, but we don't even bother to check whether more than that can be said. I wasn't suggesting that the NJ CDPs should NOT be characterized as towns (although I prefer the less ambiguous term "unincorporated community" or simply "community"), just that the situation be clarified to indicate that they do not have any legal status as organized municipalities. If I could definitively say that about Oak Valley or Turnersville, I would. All I know for sure is that Oak Valley is located within Deptford Township, and that Turnersville is located within Washington Township. Incidently, it seems that wouldn't fall under unincorporated, as we have it defined, as the places are part of a municipality, they just (probably?) aren't municipalities themselves. I suppose I can change Oak Valley to "Oak Valley is a section of Deptford Township, located in Gloucester County..." That's what they always called it when they dispatched the fire department. "Deptford Township, the Oak Valley section". The term "town" did not come from the Census Bureau, which refers to them as CDPs. Hmm, I just looked it up, and you're right. But I have seen rambot use the term CDP before. anthony (see warning) 19:57, 21 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I think it is safe to say that Oak Valley itself is not incorporated as a separate municipality. Incorporation actually gets very confusing, as you've probably noticed, and I've seen where even official sites fudge the matter. There is an important distinction between entities such as Counties or Townships, which, at least initially, are defined, created and exist as municipal entities solely through acts of the state legislature. These are sometimes called "general law" municipalities. Strictly speaking, they are not incorporated in the same way as cities or villages, in which residents request to become incorporated. The former are more properly described as being "organized" rather than incorporated. And in some states the distinction is even further blurred, in that counties and townships may be granted "charter" status or "home rule" powers, in which case they are incorporated. General law entities typically have an extremely narrow range of options for administering governmental affairs prescribed and limited by law, while incorporated entities generally have much greater leeway in determining how to run their own affairs. BTW, I've not ever seen an unedited Rambot article use the term CDP (except in the title for disambiguation purposes). There are a number of editors who have edited Rambot CDP articles to either substitute a different term for "town" or try and make it clear that "town" is not a legal designation in those articles. older≠wiser 00:45, Oct 22, 2004 (UTC)

FWIW, some of the "cities" listed on Wikipedia:US cities without articles, are there simply because that form of the name is not where the article (or any redirects) is. For example, we have an article on Mount Shasta, California and a redir at Mt. Shasta, California, but the list was looking for Mt Shasta, California, which didn't exist until I just created another redir. Niteowlneils 19:09, 23 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Articles with 'offensive' information, foul language, etc.

I have noticed that some articles feature strong language and offensive content. An example of this is Shock site. In order to let users know that the article that they are about to view falls into one of these categories, I would propose a template displaying the following notice:

Notice: This article may contain offensive language and/or information.

I think it is important that people who are 'sensitive' know what type of article they will be reading, beforehand.

Please, let me know if you agree or disagree with the creation of such a template (or if you believe the notice should be modified).--Logariasmo 07:44, 11 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I disagree with this for many reasons. First off, its just asking for edit wars (both on how the template should look and where it should be placed). Secondly its far too much of a judgement call, and will end up violating NPOV to some degree. I could give several examples of how it would be "abused" and cause arguments, but that would take forever, i'll let you use your imagination. Lastly, it isn't Wikipedia's place to police itself. We're all adults here, and if we're not its up to our parents and guardians to police us, not Wikipedia. In the cases of articles like shock site, the introduction should give ample warning to the contents of the article, and we shouldn't plaster warning signs on it. —siroχo 08:29, Oct 11, 2004 (UTC)

Seconded, on every point. • Benc • 11:12, 11 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Yes, the range of what people might find offensive is huge. For a strict Muslim, a woman's face might be offensive. Should we tag all the articles that contain a picture of one? Intrigue 23:38, 12 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I wonder where the notice would go on the Fuck article? Before you linked to it perhaps? --CloudSurfer 11:15, 15 Oct 2004 (UTC)

There far too many ugly templates in Wikipedia now that stick inane, boiler-plate announcements onto articles. (I don't need a template to tell me that an article is short or that a plot discussion may contain spoilers.) And a rating system for level of offensiveness is something I woudld find offensive. Jallan 16:00, 15 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I would rather not see any more tags like this added to articles. We already have a General disclaimer linked to from every page (twice on every page in some skins). Also, see mav's comments at Wikipedia talk:Risk disclaimer about the legal risks associated with adding warnings selectively to pages. Angela. 02:16, Oct 20, 2004 (UTC)

I agree - get rid of nearly all the tags. People know that an article about a novel will discuss the plot, or an article about genitals will be about genitals, or that a short article is short. The Recycling Troll 21:27, 21 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Wikipedians by interest

It has become quite difficult to find Wikipedians interested in certain things; e.g. when creating or expanding on articles. Maybe there should be a list (preferably at Wikipedia:List of Wikipedians by interest) for just this purpose. [[User:Poccil|Peter O. (Talk)]] 15:37, Oct 11, 2004 (UTC)

Wikipedia:List of Wikipedians by fields of interest already exists. Hope that helps! zoney ♣ talk 15:45, 11 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I'm surprised. That list should be more prominent. [[User:Poccil|Peter O. (Talk)]] 15:49, Oct 11, 2004 (UTC)

Pictures needing attention

I've just created Wikipedia:Pictures needing attention as a place to ask questions about unknown images which could probably find a place on a Wiki article. The idea is that it should be a visual analogue of Pages Needing Attention with a dash of the Reference desk. Part of the idea is to encourage people to contribute images that they had been holding back because they couldn't remember exactly what they were of and where they could be used.

Precedents for this are the occaisional images that pop-up for comment on the Reference Desk, such as the discussion for Image_talk:Wfm_monument_valley_annotated.jpg.

It could also be used for Wikipedia:Requests for image manipulation discussed above.

One problem is that you need to give an image a filename before you can upload it. It isn't easy to get a relevant filename if you don't know exactly what the subject is. -- Solipsist 20:01, 12 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Elective image filtering?

Some images, while appropriate and informative in the articles they reside in, nonetheless can be awkward to have on one's screen in a public computing environment. It would be nice in some circumstances to flag such images, and then have a user preference to be able to browse the Wikipedia in "PG mode" where the images would not display unless affirmatively clicked on. Shimmin 13:59, Oct 13, 2004 (UTC)

Indeed. Random page worries me slightly, although I haven't happened upon anything untoward as yet, no doubt there is the potential for goodness knows what to load up! zoney ♣ talk 14:08, 13 Oct 2004 (UTC)

No. No. No. No. No. A setting in Wikipedia to hide all images would be reasonable (for use in environments where it would not be acceptable to change the browser settings). A preference setting to add a command to the page display to hide images or display images would be acceptable. But a feature where individuals are encouraged to mark particular images as possibly offensive begs for misuse (and for use by any kid wanting to find all the "good stuff"). Jallan 15:52, 15 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I second Jallan. While it sounds like a good idea, simply turning off images in public computing enviroments, then turning them on for specific images is quite sufficient, AFAIK. Shimmin, if this would not work for you, please explain further. JesseW 06:09, 19 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Turning off all images would be effective, if all images were equipped with good alt text, so that one would not be surprised by what one elected to see. Shimmin 17:34, Oct 19, 2004 (UTC)

Auto RSS Feeds

Hi,

it would be a good feature if you could just mark RSS in the way that browser can autorecognize their existence and offer users to subscribe.

Currently this feature is supported by Mozilla Firefox (http://www.getfirefox.com), and it allows easy subscription by showing orange RSS in status bar. I guess that you should add this mark to your news page.

This is example of the HTML code that marks RSS for browsers:

<LINK rel="alternate" TYPE="application/rss+xml" TITLE="B92 RSS" HREF="http://www.b92.net/news/rss/rss.php">

so please include it, it would be a nice feature (and it is easy to add it).

Best regards,

Ashley

WTF? Wikipedia doesn't use RSS. Being one of the more influential members at SFX (at least I like to think so), I recognized exactly what you're doing, I read it in RSS campaign: ask sites to add auto-detection. This site however doesn't have RSS, so I just don't get it. --Me at work 21:23, 21 Oct 2004 (UTC) (yes its me)

Actually, we do have both RSS and Atom feeds available for certain utility pages - e.g. Special:RecentChanges. However, as pointed out at Bugzilla:721, the software does in fact have <link>s to these already. However, it seems what was really being asked was whether bots could be created to parse certain "news"/"announcements" pages, and then have this kind of link manually added to the page to point at them. I think. So I guess we're all a bit confused. - IMSoP 21:40, 28 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Women's colleges categories and list

We have:

• Category:Women's universities and colleges
  • Category:Women's universities and colleges in the U.S.
    • Category:Seven Sisters schools

and

• List of women's colleges in the United States
• Women's college, which contains a list of women's colleges
• Seven Sisters schools
• Template:Seven Sisters schools

Talk:Women's college (the only one with a Talk page) has some discussion about the proliferation and overlap of lists, but it's a bit dated, there's no consensus, and since there are so many different articles I thought I'd ask around here instead of just the one place.

There actually are some meaningful differences among all those pages. I think the two "women's colleges" categories make perfect sense and match the hierarchy for other universities and colleges. Seven Sisters is a subcategory of these two, except that many of the Seven Sisters have been co-ed since the 1960s and 70s and the category doesn't reflect this. The freestanding U.S. list page sorts the women's colleges by state, and the list on the Women's colleges page gives some city locations, both of which are helpful, but the page names don't indicate what's different or what each different list provides.

I am thinking we could improve things a bit:

• Keep Category:Women's universities and colleges and Category:Women's universities and colleges in the U.S. as-is, and add a note that they are intended only for colleges and universities that are currently women-only.
• Keep Seven Sisters schools and Template:Seven Sisters schools, but eliminate Category:Seven Sisters schools. It isn't needed, and I think burying some of the best-known U.S. women's colleges under a subcategory (along with others which are now co-ed) is confusing. So, move the Seven Sisters colleges that are still women-only up to the U.S. subcategory.
• Move List of women's colleges in the United States to List of historical women's universities and colleges. Sort by country and state on this page, add specific location info for each entry, note which ones are currently co-ed, retain notes for the Seven Sisters and any other women's college alliances.
• Move/merge the list off of Women's college into the abovementioned article.
• Even though I just said the category and U.S. subcategory should be limited to current women's schools only, it seems to me it would be useful to continue to include the list page itself on the U.S. subcategory, and it would be useful to include the Seven Sisters article on the U.S. subcategory also, just like the Women's college article is on the category now. So I guess limit individual institution listings to current women's schools only and then also articles related to women's colleges in general?

(I swear I'm going to have to change my user name to "Overthink".)

I am totally willing to do the legwork on all of this, but as the proposed changes are sort of significant, I thought I'd better solicit some opinions first. Does this seem like a reasonable plan? My thinking is that if prospective women's college students or other interested parties are browsing wikipedia, I'd really like to make it easier for them to find the info they are looking for. Thanks for any feedback! —Bsktcase 03:39, 14 Oct 2004 (UTC)

How long do y'all suppose I should wait for objections before I assume there aren't any and proceed?  :) —Bsktcase 20:49, 18 Oct 2004 (UTC)

All of these proposed changes seem reasonable to me. The lists are currently proliferating out of hand, and this sounds like a good scheme for merging them. Women's college and coeducation should be expanded with historical information (whether timelines or narrative), but not more and more lists. -- Rbellin 22:07, 18 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Done!

• Category:Women's universities and colleges: added note and removed one article from category which is no longer women-only
• Category:Women's universities and colleges in the U.S.: added note and confirmed that articles in category are all still women-only
• Category:Seven Sisters schools: moved all articles up to Category:Women's universities and colleges in the U.S. and listed on Wikipedia:Categories for deletion
• List of women's colleges in the United States: moved/merged to List of current and historical women's universities and colleges
• Women's college: removed/merged list content to List of current and historical women's universities and colleges
• Seven Sisters schools: moved to Seven Sisters (colleges) because that's what they are, not "girls' schools"
• Template:Seven Sisters schools: moved to Template:Seven Sisters for same reason
• Fixed all affected pages except still working on List of women's colleges in the United States redirects

Thanks for the support or at least the lack of opposition.  :) —Bsktcase 22:04, 26 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Boolean categories

Is there any chance that categories could one day be combined with boolean operators? If so, then one could look up categories "Medicine AND Law NOT Psychiatry" to obtain a defined area of knowledge. --CloudSurfer 08:33, 15 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Contacting Academics about Possible Contributions

I think it would be cool to contact academics asking them to contribute to articles that as of yet nobody else editing wikipedia seems to have a clue about. Maybe this could become an established project with suggested items and a template email. There are obviously problems with this: each academic would have to agree to be merciless edited like the rest of us(although obviously there contributions would be generally respected by people)... but it could be valuable for filling in gaps.

What do people think? dpen2000 15:32, 15 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Not likely to hurt, but I seriously doubt it will help. As wikipedia's profile rises, interested academics will start to contribute. I'm confident my academic friends would not respond to a cold contact asking for free labor on a web site they've never heard of. On the other hand, some have contributed after discovering it themselves. Wolfman 17:53, 16 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I do think, however, that it is useful to contact academics about the possibility of involving their classes in structured projects related to Wikipedia, or about urging them -- and their stronger students -- to release good papers under GFDL. -- Jmabel | Talk 20:12, Oct 16, 2004 (UTC)

Asking them to encourage students is a good thought. Also possibly lecture notes which could be turned into an article easily. Or good survey articles, which they happen to have already written and posted on the web. I suspect success would be most likely through personal contact, particularly by students of a professor who are involved in wikipedia. Asking directly for the professors to write articles is unlikely to work, in my opinion (i'm a professor). But encouraging low-cost contributions like those mentioned above, might get some immediate response and possibly some direct contributions in the longer run. Wolfman 00:06, 17 Oct 2004 (UTC)

September 11 (revisited)

The previous poll at Talk:September 11, 2001 attacks has ended, with varying support and opposition for the different options. Based on the response (which was spread across many proposed titles), a runoff between the two most voted on options has been proposed.

There is now a vote on which of the following should be the article title:

• September 11, 2001 attacks (the current location)
• Attacks of September 11, 2001

Please vote and express your preference. A wider response than previously would be appreciated.

zoney ♣ talk 16:09, 15 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Allowing non-sysops to view deleted pages

I would like to propose, after discussing it on the #wikipedia IRC channel, that regular users be able to view deleted pages - probably just Special:Undelete/pagename without a restore button. This would make VfU a lot more useful, and help soften the effect that deletion has. The main reasons we delete pages as it is is, as far as I know, is to keep the article namespace clean of non-encyclopedic material, to prevent search engines from archiving this material, and to prevent copyright violations from being on the site. For copyright violations, I'd propose that we simply have a developer remove the page from history as soon as we get a complaint, or have two types of deletion, one of which flags the deleted page as a copyvio and doesn't allow non-sysops to read it. Any suggestions? Yelyos 23:07, Oct 16, 2004 (UTC)

I support the idea of non-sysops being able to view deleted versions in the interests of transparency - but the copyvios issue would need to be addressed. Although, to be honest, if sysops can view deleted copyvios, we probably have a problem. Copyvios surely need to be hard-deleted as soon as identified? zoney ♣ talk 23:19, 16 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Legally, Wikipedia is only required to delete a copyright violation as soon as a complaint is recieved, so we could simply handle the problem by editing the history of pages as soon as we recieve complaints. I'm not sure how scalable this is (I doubt the number of copyright violation notices would be that high), although we could empower some very trusted users (sysops maybe, or a class of 'trusted user' beyond sysop) with the ability to replace history versions of deleted pages with copyright violation notices if it gets overwhelming for the current developers. Yelyos 23:38, Oct 16, 2004 (UTC)

If this is going to be done, I'd suggest that it be done in a way which allows use of Special:Export for these files. And I repeat my vow to never participate on VfD or VfU again if I'm given access to view deleted articles. anthony (see warning) 00:13, 17 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Should I do up a voting page on this? Yelyos 05:20, Oct 17, 2004 (UTC)

This is a great idea. Out of interest, Anthony, why that vow? Mark Richards 17:48, 17 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Because the only reason I oppose deletion of articles which contain useful information is because I can't easily access that information after it has been deleted. anthony (see warning) 17:54, 19 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I oppose this idea. One reason that articles are deleted is because it is not legal for us to distribute them. Keeping a deleted archive for administrative reasons, viewable only by administrators, is very different from having them available for anyone to view.

Another reason for deletion is to prevent people adding inappropriate content or hosting their own site within Wikipedia. If anyone could view deleted content, trolls would host their nonsense at Wikipedia, and people will still be able to see it and link to it. Deletion is supposed to get rid of this stuff.

The legal problems apply not only to copyright violations, which in theory might not need to be removed before a complaint is received, but also libelous and defaming content.

I don't understand the benefits of this proposal. For articles deleted via VfD, there is five days in which to view them anyway, and for speedy deleted articles, the entire content is almost always part of the deletion reason summary.

To avoid the problem of having illegal but deleted content still available, you would need two levels of deletion, where you need another VfD to decide which deleted pages should not be viewable by everyone. VfD itself is not scaling well, so imagine what it would be like to have to vote on every listing twice to see whether it was something that should not be viewable after deletion. You'd also need this vote for every speedy deleted page which at current levels of deletion does not even seem possible. 521 pages were deleted yesterday. I fail to see how a consensus on which should be available for viewing could be reached on so many pages every single day.

Deletion ought to actually mean deletion, not just hidden.

Angela. 02:11, Oct 20, 2004 (UTC)

• Keeping a deleted archive for administrative reasons, viewable only by administrators, is very different from having them available for anyone to view. What if it were only available to editors? What if it were only available to editors who specifically requested the ability? I don't understand the benefits of this proposal. For articles deleted via VfD, there is five days in which to view them anyway, and for speedy deleted articles, the entire content is almost always part of the deletion reason summary. This is very often not the case with speedy deletions, and backups of the database are not always made within five days. Also, the text of speedy deletions does not include the history, which is necessary for those who wish to use the content under the GFDL. This makes it very difficult to view or use deleted articles. To avoid the problem of having illegal but deleted content still available, you would need two levels of deletion, where you need another VfD to decide which deleted pages should not be viewable by everyone. This wouldn't have to be decided via another VfD, it could be a simple option given to the admin who makes the deletion. Deletion ought to actually mean deletion, not just hidden. Well, it doesn't. anthony (see warning) 02:20, 20 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I oppose this idea. Angela speaks my mind regarding most of the problems. Wikipedia's inclusion policy is broad, and despite the level of acrimony at VfD, there are extremely few articles that are deleted that are useful to anyone in any way at all. We already have problems with advocacy sites deep-linking to a particular version of a Wikipedia article that reflects their POV. Permitting casual users to view deleted pages would pose this same problem, and would pose the problem of title spam as seen in the alt.* newsgroup hierarchy.

uc 14:43, 25 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Wikipedia's inclusion policy is broad, and despite the level of acrimony at VfD, there are extremely few articles that are deleted that are useful to anyone in any way at all. Maybe if you consider thousands to be extremely few. We already have problems with advocacy sites deep-linking to a particular version of a Wikipedia article that reflects their POV. Why is this a problem? Your use of the term deep-linking is especially suspect. That's a term which is generally used by proprietary sites. It brings up images of Ticketmaster Corp. v. Tickets.com Inc., where Ticketmaster tried to claim that making web links was actually illegal. Deep Linking is Good Linking. Permitting casual users to view deleted pages would pose this same problem, and would pose the problem of title spam as seen in the alt.* newsgroup hierarchy. There's no reason we have to permit casual users. The proposal specifically says "regular users", and we could restrict it even more than that, to "users who specifically request it". anthony 警告 16:43, 25 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I've added a proposal to Wikipedia:Viewing deleted articles. anthony 警告 22:34, 26 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Vastly enhance wiki through newsgoups?

If there were a tabs on article pages that led to a newsgroup provider, offering to host discussions of the articles topic, many wiki functions could be vastly enhanced and some difficulties avoided and article developement spurred forward. Discuss at wblakesxWblakesx 17:15, 18 Oct 2004 (UTC) to dialogue.

Indigo Moving

I want to see if anyone has opinions on the following page move I suggest:

• Move Indigo dye to Indigo. This will not change the title of Indigo (disambiguation), and the color article can be named Indigo (color). Any opinions on this?? 66.245.103.202 21:16, 18 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I have no objection to moving it, but I have no objections to the way it is. Why do you want to move it? Was someone confused? JesseW 06:03, 19 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I say it should be moved for reasons primarily relating to the information on Talk:Indigo. 66.32.245.70 20:00, 19 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I disagree. The colour article should be at Indigo (colour) :-) Seriously though, surely the colour should be at Indigo if that's not to be a disambiguation page? zoney ♣ talk 09:24, 20 Oct 2004 (UTC)

New Proposed Footnote format

I've come up with, IMO, a better format for handling footnotes. The current guidelines are confusing and unnessarily ugly and difficult. Please take a look at Wikipedia:Footnotes and let me know what you think! JesseW 06:01, 19 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Note that there is some (oldish) discussion of a software feature for footnotes at meta:Footnotes - IMSoP 21:48, 28 Oct 2004 (UTC)

As good as an Article can be

We have a large number of articles that I believe are in a state where they represent a state of 'as good as it can get'. This might be because the article is an enhanced dictionary definition or because the finest word-smithing has now been done and further change might probably detract.

I would propose that such articles are identified, listed and voted into some sort of protected status whereby change could only be carried out provided proper debate had taken place. This would remove lots of articles from possible vandalism, reduces the review of changes to what were finished articles still being fine tuned etc.

I further propose that changes would be done by making a revised draft and that draft be voted on to replace the previously 'frozen' version.

I accept that this is a major change to policy and welcome views of every one. --Rjstott 06:36, 20 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Warning: this next posting contains irony.

I agree, if you let me pick the articles to be protected. Filiocht 08:05, Oct 20, 2004 (UTC)

No. See Nupedia. -- Cyrius|✎ 13:20, 20 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Aargh. Please. No. Mark Richards 17:56, 20 Oct 2004 (UTC)

End of irony ;-)

I think many of the articles you mention are already in a something close to that state. If you try changing them, most of the time your changes will be reverted quite quickly unless they have been already subject to "proper debate" on the Talk page. The only difference between the staus quo and your proposal is that articles could be in this state without having someone "guarding", i.e., regularly checking, them for changes. That that new state would be better is what you need to argue for; please do.

A related possible change could be to make this state of "semi-frozen" more formally clear, by a template that could be added to Talk pages, etc. This has been discussed some in various places(I don't remember where right now) but no consensus has been reached AFAIK. JesseW 03:39, 21 Oct 2004 (UTC)

These are good points made above. One is that effort is going into watching for changes to articles, which at the current rate of change can be very time consuming, secondly the watchers are self-appointed and it's easy to fall foul of this, certainly notification of the status would help. I read the Nupedia intro and certainly don't want that but I strongly believe if we could impose a form of protection it would help. This same protection might also be applied in cases of dispute to prevent revert wars. --Rjstott 10:53, 23 Oct 2004 (UTC)

If an article is as good as it can get, you should nominate it as a featured article. anthony (see warning) 12:53, 21 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Perhaps this would be one mechanism whereby such protection could be obtained? --Rjstott 11:07, 23 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Irony warning ctd.

At which point it will promptly be improved. Filiocht 12:59, Oct 21, 2004 (UTC)

Articles that have matured, have good facts, and have been well reviewed deserve to be baselined and made safe from vandals. But I don't think Wikipedia is the right place to do that. Better would be the proposed Wikipedia Version 1.0, placed in a physical medium. If that proposal was moving forward, of which I've seen no sign.

OT - I've just discovered my home system requires 20 minutes to load the Village Pump, so this is probably the only time I'll ever contribute to it. Glenn6502 01:58, 22 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I'm a moderator for http://wiki.linuxquestions.org , and I've been pondering this same question. We don't yet have featured articles implemented yet, but when we do, I think we'll upload new featured articles to the Linux Documentation Project, which is a traditional peer-reviewed documentation repository. We would make changes based on their recommendations until the article is approved. We would then periodically submit updated versions of the article. The Wikipedia could do the same thing (but you'd have to go through the backlog of featured articles), but first you'd have to create a peer-review setup, since there isn't an existing one in place. crazyeddie 21:46, 24 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Deletion log

I have another deletion related proposal, hopefully less controversial than the one on the other part of the pump.

I strongly support increasing the number of articles that can be speedy deleted. As policies get more complicated it inevitably makes it more necessary to check the deletion log to ensure admins are complying with policy. To make checking the deletion log easier why not replace the link on recent changes to Special:Ancient Pages? Old pages seems to not be functioning most of the time, and I see no reason why old pages are more of a priority than short, deadened, or orphaned pages all of which get by with only being linked to from Special:Special Pages. For symmetry's sake the deletion log is also much closer companion to the new pages log than is old pages. - SimonP 05:18, Oct 23, 2004 (UTC)

Can I take this silence to mean there are no objections? - SimonP 19:06, Oct 23, 2004 (UTC)

Perhaps a section for links to all the administrative logs could be created (Deletion, Block, Protection, etc.)? It might be a good feature to increase the visibility of administrator actions. --Slowking Man 00:03, Oct 24, 2004 (UTC)

Add a "Go to Top"/ something similar link at the bottom of every page

Hi, I think it would be pretty convenient for everyone to have a "Go to top of page" link on every Wikipedia article/ talk page - especially on long pages (perhaps the link can appear automatically if the page exceeds a certain size). -- Simonides 23:40, 23 Oct 2004 (UTC)

As someone pointed out in #wikipedia, Ctrl+Home, in most browsers, goes to the top of the page. Is this really necessary? --Slowking Man 00:01, Oct 24, 2004 (UTC)

I'm sure this comes as a rude shock to the browser savvy, but I doubt the majority of people reading Wikipedia (apart from Wikipedians) are aware of the Ctrl+M command. -- Simonides 00:40, 24 Oct 2004 (UTC)

But every keyboard I've seen has a "Home" key, which certainly takes you to the top of the page. (And, more useful on a lot of Wikipedia: pages, an "End" key.) --jpgordon{gab} 00:50, 24 Oct 2004 (UTC)

It's good to have as many ways of doing a task as possible. Let the user decide which one they want to use. Even if a user knows to use "Home" or Ctrl+M keys, which is a very small minority of users, they might prefer to use the mouse instead. I know I do. crazyeddie 21:32, 24 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Yes. I don't understand the resistance to a minor addition that covers more possibilities and is a convenience to most users. -- Simonides 13:07, 25 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Well, in defense of the conservative viewpoint, this minor addition would take up valuable screen real estate and coder time. However, it looks to me like it wouldn't add too much clutter to the bottom of the screen, and this minor addition shouldn't be too bothersome to code. While this change isn't necessary, it would greatly increase convenience. crazyeddie 18:03, 25 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I don't see it as being a particular problem to have such a line, if it's warranted. Most articles are barely a screen long (depending on resolution, of course, font, etc.), but for those articles that are very long, it might be worthwhile to put a nav box in. The TOC at the top of the article could be repeated. However, I would like to say that it should not be a command that all articles have them, only that it's a nice thing to do if you find yourself working on a very long article (like that full length discussion of Harry Potter's wand or whatever). Geogre 17:29, 27 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Auto-generated Special Interest Groups

One of the main motives for contributing to a wiki is discussing your interests with other people who share them. It seems to me that there is a need for discussion areas somewhere between article talk pages and the Village Pump. With the various regional notice boards, and such initiatives as Project Crossbow, it looks like a few people agree with me. Here's an idea for auto-generating discussion groups based on subject matter. I'm not proposing that the Wikipedia adopt the idea, I'm just polling for opinions on the matter.

I think the optimum size for a discussion group is between 20-200 members. Below 20, there isn't enough variety of opinion, and groupthink might set in. Above 200, the signal-to-noise ratio drops, although discussion is still possible up to about the 400 mark. As a sanity check, I checked out number of members of various legislatures at List_of_state_legislatures_of_the_United_States. The results agreed with this hypothesis:

Higher House Highest: 67 Lowest: 20 Mean: 38.7 Median: 38

Lower House Highest: 400 Lowest: 40 Mean: 108.3 Median: 100

It should be noted that the second largest body, Pennsylvania's lower house, has only 203 members. Note the difference between the mean and median figures on the Lower House table.

To start, take a list of contributor logins. Throw out any known bots. Throw out any inactive contributors. What “inactive” means is a bit arbitrary, I would suggest no edits for the last 30 (or possibly 90) days as a definition.

It might also be a good idea to limit the list to “elder” contributors, those with 100 or more edits to their name. Before I get flamed on this point, I'd like to point out that I'm currently under 100 edits myself. “Younger” and anon contributors would of course be allowed to participate in these groups, but it might be wise not to assign a contributor to a group until they reach the 100 edit mark. (It is, of course, not possible to assign an anon to such a group.) In addition to cutting down on sock puppets, a contributor might be assigned to an inappropriate group based on too small of a sample size of their edits. If “younger” contributors are to be assigned to groups, they should be re-evaluated for group assignment fairly often, perhaps as often as every 5 edits. (Reassignments would take place during off-peak hours, so no more than one reassignment a day.) Incidentally, any idea how many active “elder” contributors there are?

Anyway, you take the resulting list, and sort it by number of edits. Take the top x contributors. (20 might be a good value for x.) These contributors are the first members of their own groups. Starting at the bottom of the list (to help slow down how fast a group's subject area spreads), compare what articles each contributor has edited, and assign them to the group which has the most overlap. (Limit this to main namespace articles, of course.)

When a group reaches the 200 member mark, split off the two most senior (in terms of edits) members. Starting with the most junior member of the group, assign members to one of the two daughter groups. Since the results will be a lot closer than the general assigning, might want to weight based on number of edits on each article.

After all contributors have been assigned, disband any group at or below the 20 member mark, and disperse its members among the other groups. Again, split up any group that hits the 200 mark.

Auto-generate a page for each group in a separate name space, say, “Special Interest:”. Since it would be hard to write a script to determine the nature of the group, assign a serial number to each group. (Or name the group after the most shared article, and give groups with the same article a number.) This page would have a list of the members, and a list of articles, sorted by the number of group members who have edited the article. The group's discussions would take place in the associated talk page.

After the initial setup, the group system ought to be maintained on a daily basis, during offpeak hours. Assigning new contributors, splitting maxed out groups, delisting inactive contributors, and disbanding minimum-ed out groups. Since you probably don't want to be with the same group your entire Wikipedian career, if this doesn't produce enough churn, then “elder” contributors' group memberships could be reevaluated at 100, 50, or even 25 edit intervals.

Comments? crazyeddie 21:29, 24 Oct 2004 (UTC)

It would be really cool, IMO, if it was possible to implement this on an outside site (i.e. crazyeddie's if you're interested); that way, those Wikipedians who wanted to use the system to find BOAFs could, but it would not burden the main site. If it became wildly popular, of course, it could me moved over. I don't know if it's possible to implement this in this offsite way, but I think it should be doable, since the cur and old tables are downloadable... JesseW 12:27, 26 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I'm afraid I don't have a site or the coding skills to pull this off by myself. If someone likes the idea and wants to run with it, you have my blessing. I'm not sure how much of a load this would put on the main site, since all the work would be done on off-peak hours. Also, if server loads got too high, updating could be put off temporarily. But it might take an off-site trial to prove the idea.

This idea does have some tie-ins with some other ideas on the page. Somebody got pointed to a "Wikipedians by interest" list. It seems to me that this method would be a more accurate version of the same thing. Another person suggested a "catagory maintainer". Each interest group could elect a maintainer. Slightly different, but same result.

I'm personally now leaning away from making the groups "elders" only. Does anybody have any guesses on the current number of active contributors, elder or otherwise? crazyeddie 17:45, 26 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Also, it might not be good to limit the groups to main namespace articles - there might be a Village Pump BOAF Group (good name by the way). crazyeddie 17:48, 26 Oct 2004 (UTC)

One last thought - it seems to me that this system would be a possible supplement or even replacement for the catagory system, with lots of room for interesting, serendipitous results. crazyeddie 17:51, 26 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Only locally relevant entries

It may be that something like this has already been suggested but: Occasionally anons enter articles about local features - locally prominent landmarks, restaurants, schools, etc - that usually end up being nominated for deletion. At the same time there are numerous articles about small towns that contain mainly numerical census data. If some things have mainly local significance, maybe we could encourage people to add them to articles about that locality? - Skysmith 09:22, 25 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Maybe we could encourage people not to delete factual, verifiable and interesting articles? Mark Richards 19:42, 25 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Plenty of things are factual, interesting, and not encyclopedic, certainly not at the level of meriting articles of their own. Yes, I agree competely with Skysmith: if, for example, you want to write about your high school, which virtually no one outside of your town has heard of, write it in the context of the article of your town or (if it's a big city) do an article on the city's public school system. See for example [[5]] or Seattle Public Schools; either of these could do with some expansion -- in particular, both figured interestingly in the history of school integration -- but these are examples, in my view, of handling this appropriately. -- Jmabel | Talk 21:22, Oct 25, 2004 (UTC)

I really like Skysmith's idea of just integrating these things into articles about the locality. It makes complete sense. Obviously we shouldn't get down to the barbershop-on-the-corner level, but there is another level of information that could be in those article. —siroχo 10:13, Oct 26, 2004 (UTC)

I like this idea. It would certainly be a lot less time we have to waste on VFD. And we wouldn't be as reliant on admins. Anyone can merge and redirect. anthony 警告 01:12, 27 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Indeed, it's the best way to do things to have The Big Pickle in Pickletown, rather than as a separate article. There are a few things that gather notice outside of their towns (Peachoid, e.g.), but most of these are empty calories. As for "no one should delete verifiable information," remember that there are more facts than things in the world. Encyclopedias are not the reference equivalent of a person with Tourette's compulsively trying to touch every tree in the park. It is a work designed for use, not just vaccuuming up. At any rate, where I have seen bad local-only articles come in SCHOOLS (all hail the local 5 & Dime and the hallowed halls of Peabody Primary for Preteens!) and neighborhoods. In particular, most of the latter have come in the cases of places where Rambot doesn't go -- Australia, in particular -- and in places that are too big for such narrow focus -- Seattle, in particular. So a New Page shows up called Merrylake. You find out that it's a park in Canberra. Not the park, just a park. Ok. Or you see a new page, and it's called Valleydown. You find out that it is a subdivision in Seattle. You can't merge that in and have any end to the article, and so you can either speedy delete it or VfD it or, of course, say that it's a verifiable fact and therefore is sacred and that anyone who thinks otherwise is deletionist scum. Geogre 17:24, 27 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I think there's a reasonable home for just about anything. Merges can be done, and when things get too crowded in the parent, splits can be made. When there are too many subdivisions in a seattle article, you move all but the most important to Subdivisions of Seattle. When too many parks are listed in Canberra, you start Parks in Canberra. I do think we need to distinguish between facts and knowledge, though, as there are an infinite number of facts. We wouldn't keep the facts "1002 is a number, 1003 is a number, 1004 is a number, etc." What we'd do instead is explain the concept on the number article. Finally, we should consider that Wikipedia is part of a larger project, Wikimedia. Some detail (e.g. the latitude and longitude of every single fire hydrant in a certain city) might go beyond that which is reasonable to include in an encyclopedia. But that doesn't mean we should delete it, rather it should be preserved somewhere so it can be used in future projects. In the example of the fire hydrant locations, this would be great information for a detailed interactive map of the world, which is one of the things I'd like to see in my proposed project meta:Wikiteer. anthony 警告 13:22, 30 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Search Disabled Behavior

When search is disabled on Wikipedia (for performance reasons), would it be expensive to redirect to the search query if there is an exact match on the title of an article? (ie, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SearchString) My guess is no, and this would make WP a lot more useful from, for instance, the firefox search box. Searching seems to be disabled frequently these days.

"Citing Wikipedia" link, or Citation Box, on every page

"How do I cite this" is definitely one of the most frequently asked questions at VP, Help desk, and talk pages, and is only going to become more critical as more users rely on us as their first line of research. At the very least, a link to W:Citing Wikipedia in a prominent place on each article would be very helpful.

A recent suggestion on W:Help desk sounded great -- perhaps we could include a "citation box" at the bottom of each page (perhaps below the article box and tabs, but above the "About" box). This could include a basic bibliographic citation for that individual article, in the most common (or most complete) citation style, ready for users to copy and paste into their report/article/whatever and modify to their own teacher's/editor's needs. It could also include a link to the Citing Wikipedia page, and perhaps even a link to go to (or expose a hidden div with) a more complete selection of auto-citations for that article, in several different styles. I'd guess that most of the variables needed to construct a unique citation (Page Title, Date, etc.) are already there within the MediaWiki code. And including full version URL with version ID (when that's available) would lay to rest fears of "but it said that when I WROTE the report...." Of course this could easily be included on the print css too, to provide a concrete citation and version reference for those who just want to print an article and reuse it in some way.

If a full box is considered too large/clumsy, a Cite this article link could lead to/reveal one of these:

Note I'm just hacking examples together here -- I'm not much of a css wizard so I'm sure it would be improved in size and presentation (I don't see variables for last revision date, so I'll fake it here)

==Cite this article == APA style Village pump (proposals) (<<LASTREVISIONMONTHNAME>> <<LASTREVISIONDAY>>, <<LASTREVISIONYEAR>>, <<LASTREVISIONTIME>> UTC). In Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved from //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(proposals). see more citation styles see Citing Wikipedia

Or:

==Cite this article== APA style Village pump (proposals) (<<LASTREVISIONMONTHNAME>> <<LASTREVISIONDAY>>, <<LASTREVISIONYEAR>>, <<LASTREVISIONTIME>> UTC). In Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved from //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(proposals). MLA style "Village pump (proposals)." Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. <<LASTREVISIONDAY>> <<LASTREVISIONMONTHNAME>> <<LASTREVISIONYEAR>>, <<LASTREVISIONTIME>> UTC. 5 June 2025 //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(proposals)>. MHRA style [n.a.], 'Village pump (proposals)', Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia, <<LASTREVISIONDAY>> <<LASTREVISIONMONTHNAME>> <<LASTREVISIONYEAR>>, <<LASTREVISIONTIME>> UTC, <//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(proposals)>. [accessed 5 June 2025] Turabian-style foot/endnotes 1"Village pump (proposals)," in Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia; (Wikimedia Foundation Inc., updated <<LASTREVISIONDAY>> <<LASTREVISIONMONTHNAME>> <<LASTREVISIONYEAR>>, <<LASTREVISIONTIME>> UTC) [encyclopedia on-line]; available from //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(proposals); Internet; accessed 5 June 2025. Turabian-style bibliography "Village pump (proposals)." Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation Inc. Updated <<LASTREVISIONDAY>> <<LASTREVISIONMONTHNAME>> <<LASTREVISIONYEAR>>, <<LASTREVISIONTIME>> UTC. Encyclopedia on-line. Available from //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(proposals). Internet. Accessed 5 June 2025. for more information, see Citing Wikipedia

Comments? Catherine 10:51, 23 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Wouldn't it be fine to use {{CURRENTMONTH}} {{CURRENTDAY}}, {{CURRENTYEAR}}. {{CURRENTTIME}} UTC? That woudl give the time of retrieval. —siroχo 01:35, Oct 26, 2004 (UTC)

That's what I did for the dates that are displaying as dates, above -- but most of the citation styles given on "Citing Wikipedia" require the Last Revision Date in addition to the date it was accessed. I'm sure there's a way to do this in MediaWiki; there might even be a variable for it that's not advertised on Help:Variable -- I just don't know enough to do it properly. Remember one big advantage of this is allowing people to cite a particular VERSION of an article -- what it said at the time they referred to it, not what it says now, some indeterminate time later. Catherine | talk 00:49, 27 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I'd rather see one "cite this article" link than further clutter our already somewhat excessive boilerplate. -- Jmabel | Talk 06:16, Oct 26, 2004 (UTC)

I agree with this, although it should be a fairly prominent link. Having a link would allow for a full page with multiple citation styles. Unfortunately, it'd require more special code than footer boilerplate. -- Cyrius|✎ 14:36, 26 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I tend to agree too -- I was thinking that we should have ONE style, in small print, with a link for more, in a box that's part of the webpage itself, not the article (like the yellow-bordered GNU FDL, About Wikipedia, Powered by MediaWiki box that's currently at the bottom of the page). It didn't really occur to me that it should be an in-article template -- it's something that shouldn't be removed from an article, after all. Failing that, a "Cite this article" link should certainly be prominent -- perhaps a sidebar link, even. Catherine | talk 00:49, 27 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Perhaps we could create a Special page, so that Special:Citation/Foo would give a set of auto-generated citations, as above (with the advantage that the Special page code could interface directly with the DB to get the required info, rather than needing more magic variables). This could then be linked to in the "toolbox" part of the sidebar for every article. We could use a MediaWiki: page (or perhaps a set of them, I'm not sure) in which the boilerplates were stored, allowing new styles to be added, tweaked, and of course translated. (Hmm. I think I may have just contradicted myself: for editing a MediaWiki: page, having named variables would probably be rather handy after all, even if we used them extra-magically within the Special page itself...) - IMSoP 22:05, 27 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I note that somebody has now submitted this as a feature request at Bugzilla:800, and suggest further discussion be at least summarised there, for future reference. - IMSoP 14:18, 29 Oct 2004 (UTC)

We just had a discussion about this at the reference desk Wikipedia:Reference_desk#Tourism_article_Author.3F. While a link at the bottom of a page to an automatic citation like the above would be great, in the meantime why can't we put a "Cite this article" link to the current citation page right between 'About Wikipedia' and 'disclaimers'? By the way, I love the second option above showing multiple citation styles. But why not use the current date of the article, in the form the reader currently wants to cite? - Taxman 15:47, Oct 29, 2004 (UTC)

wikipuliki

On the page too much wiki-stress, Solipsist posted the following suggestion: ...I wonder whether there is a general solution. Rather than all the slightly negative 'Requests for Comment' and the like (which seldom seems to get anywhere), perhaps we need a page where people can say 'I'm feeling too stressed/under seige' in order to illicit positive support (group hug) from others who appreciate their contributions.
Now i think this is a rather cool concept so i combined the hawaiian word for hug with wiki and got wikipuliki. Does anyone else think (esp considering that several high profile users have recently quit, due at least in part to wikistress) that a page whos sole purpose is to give group hugs and other positive type things would be a good idea? The bellman 08:44, 2004 Oct 26 (UTC) Update: i just discovered Wikipedia:Department_of_Fun, which is in a similar vain as my proposal. The bellman 09:32, 2004 Oct 30 (UTC)

comments: What can I Say , great idea —siroχo 10:10, Oct 26, 2004 (UTC)

Only tempts me if it becomes a way to get people to actually come help with the problems causing the stress. See, for example, my recent posting Wikipedia:Village_pump_(miscellaneous)#Israel.2FPalestine, to which I've had no response in the over 36 hours since I posted it. -- Jmabel | Talk 23:42, Oct 26, 2004 (UTC)

Easy access to User Contributions

On all of my Wikimedia User pages, I have included a link to Special:Contributions/PhilHibbs because I think it is important to be able to see what a user has contributed, especially if there is a suspicion of bias, vandalism, or spamming. I would like to see this available on all User pages with a single click, much as History, Discussion, etc. are. PhilHibbs 16:37, 26 Oct 2004 (UTC)

It is available in all user pages. -- Jmabel | Talk 23:43, Oct 26, 2004 (UTC)

Ah, in the "Toolbox"! Cheers. PhilHibbs 11:50, 27 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Temperance Fountain

Moved to Wikipedia:Reference Desk

Alexander Hamilton

Moved to Wikipedia:Reference Desk

CSS based tooltips

Based on some experimenting on the Dutch wikipedia, i came up with a partial solution for using tooltips in the wikipedia. It works in Mozilla/Firefox, but not in Internet Explorer, and it requires an adaption to your personal stylesheet. See User:Taka/Tooltips. --Taka 20:30, 27 Oct 2004 (UTC)

How about adding dates to subpages for easier archival/removal of old discussions & smaller pump subpages?

How about not worrying too much about archiving/removal of old discussions from the pump by having pages like Village pump (proposals) (Oct 29, 2004)? At any time two such pages would be transcluded, with the "add new discussion" links pointing to the more recent one. Once the older one grows old, we just have to remove the old links, create a new Village pump (''section name'') (''date'') page and transclude that. We can have a redirect from Village pump (''section name'') to the latest Village pump (''section name'') (''date''), so that only that redirect needs to be updated.

This would hopefully make it easier to restrict the pump sections to editable limits. -- Paddu 21:16, 28 Oct 2004 (UTC)

That sounds really smart! I like the idea. Catherine | talk 21:38, 28 Oct 2004 (UTC)

The big problem with this is watchlists: if you are watching "x (October)", and "x (november)" is created from fresh, you will not be watching it. Whereas a moved page leaves you with both on your watchlist, and a manually archived page leaves you with the one that is actually changing. I, for one, use the watchlist as a convenient way of accessing pages like the VP (since they're bound to be somewhere at the top of it). - IMSoP 21:55, 28 Oct 2004 (UTC)

To access pages like VP you could use the Community portal. I thought that's what it is for. -- Paddu 08:28, 29 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Yeah, I guess I could get used to not being able to do that trick (it broke for a bit when the pump was split recently, anyway, cos I didn't have each section watched). Personally, I tend towards the view that nothing should end up in a "village pump archive", except a list of links to where things were actually archived / discussed, but that's a lot of maintenance. My reasoning being that finding anything in such an archive is an absolute. But actually, one advantage of this particular suggestion is that unlike with other archiving systems, links to a particular discussion will be ever-lasting: a link to [[Wikipedia:Village pump (section) (date)#header]] can be created as soon as the header is, and will still take you to the right place years later! Basically, we need a better discussion structure in the software, but I won't hold my breath... *shrug* I guess I'll cope with whatever form things take for now, but this idea does actually make some sense. - IMSoP 16:38, 29 Oct 2004 (UTC)

BTW old discussions could also be removed. I'm neutral on whether they should be archived (since AFAICT archiving is done irregularly -- some discussions are archived & some deleted, I always rely on the history section in case I'm ever interested in what I said in the pump years ago), but I suppose my suggestion would lead to smaller pages. That was my main intention, but my fingers typed an unrelated title in a hurry.

Also what could be done is that the subpages a few months old need not be linked to from the main Village pump, but they need not be deleted until they're several months old. -- Paddu 18:52, 29 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Well, there's no real reason to delete them ever, is there? Wiki is not paper, after all, and if they're date-based pages, they don't even clog the DB up with page history... - IMSoP 23:26, 29 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Minor: links at bottom of contribution list

It's a small thing, but these links at the top of "User Contributions"?

View (previous 50) (next 50) (20 | 50 | 100 | 250 | 500). 

Could we have them on the bottom, too? It'd make it much easier to peruse someone's contribution list.... Catherine | talk 21:38, 28 Oct 2004 (UTC)

As this requires a (fairly minor) change to the software, I suggest you submit a "bug" to MediaZilla, marking its "severity" as "enhancement". This makes it easy for developers to see and keep track of your request. - IMSoP 16:44, 29 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Using Wikipedia to create a respository of Common Sense.

Hi,

I have a suggestion for a method of using Wikipedia to create a respository of Common Sense which can complement the knowledge bases produced by OpenCyc and OpenMind and help in making further progress towards artificial intellignce.

Wikipedia can be used as a harbour for closer collaboration between AI researchers and the general public as well as for mining common sense. I wish to know your opinion about this.

Please have a look at

• User:SudarshanP
• List_of_Lists_useful_for_AI
  • Pls check out my personal page first so the list of lists funda makes more sense.

Again, I used a list as a random choice. I guess using categories is better. But what is more important is whether the Wiki community likes or dislikes this from happening to Wikipedia. Please let me know on the discussion page.

The cheat from home star runner.

The cheat has a gold tooth. Can someone add that? Clownfish 19:21, 29 Oct 2004 (UTC)

It seems that you've figured out that you can do it yourself. (although you misspelled "gold" as "good") -- Cyrius|✎ 04:19, 30 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Protecting the pump

Since we are expected to post to individual pump sections rather than to the pump, it should probably be protected. That way, people like me who've bookmarked the link to add a new section to the village pump would also come to know of the new policy of posting to individual sections. -- Paddu 21:10, 21 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Moved that from Wikipedia:Village pump (technical). -- Paddu 19:27, 29 Oct 2004 (UTC)