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Latest comment: 9 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
A lot of the backlogged pages remain unattended for a lengthy period of time. I have a couple of proposals to fix that. I think that problem could be resolved if each administrator is assigned to a shift during which they have to be available.
Another idea that I would like you to consider is to start to allow advertising on your website. That way you could pay the administrators, and more people will want the job. That would fix the shortage of workers. Please note that this is separate from the first idea.
It might be beneficial to take one of my proposed ideas or even both of them. I know that the second one might be too much of a burden but I really think the first one might be beneficial. 99.53.112.186 (talk) 19:16, 2 August 2015 (UTC)
An idea for how to fund Wikipedia without annoying anyone
Latest comment: 9 years ago10 comments10 people in discussion
Hi all, I've been studying a bunch of big data business cases recently to prepare to teach an MSc course, and it gave an idea for funding Wikipedia, what do people think to this?
The standard business model of all the Web2.0 sites is to give away a web service in exchange for information about users, which they then sell to advertisers. Obviously we don't want to run ads on Wikipedia or spy on users. But there could still be a way to use the user-interests information to make the world more efficient. There are many others sites that we use that do run ads, and those sites would like to know more about us to make their ads more targeted. As a user, I don't mind them doing this and in fact if a site has ads at all, I /prefer/ them to be more relevant to me. So I really wouldn't mind Wikipedia selling all the meta-information about my interests to other sites who could use them to improve their advertising. Obviously there are many people who don't want their interests monitoring like this, so the system should be strictly opt-in. But I think many of us would be happy to "donate" meta information about our interests rather than having to donate money all the time (which we currently do) to keep the servers running. The system could maybe have some clever settings system so you tell it, say, to only use information about your professional rather than personal interests on a work PC and vice versa on a home PC, or whatever. If you don't want to do it with ads, the information could be sold to companies like Amazon, who would like to know if you're been reading a page about an author so they can recommend more relevant books next time you visit amazon.com's home page. What do people think to this, as an alternative or complement to the current fundraisers? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 92.26.233.208 (talk) 14:25, 17 July 2015 (UTC)
Looking at the indents, I think StudiesWorld is referring to the original idea. I'm opposed to that as well. I don't expect a library to sell info about the books I check out (even if they have an opt-in system) and I have the same expectations of Wikipedia. --NeilNtalk to me16:58, 25 July 2015 (UTC)
we don't get asked to donate money all the time, just in an annual fundraiser. That method works so well the fundraisers are getting shorter. Selling meta information has a couple of drawbacks, if you only sell information that is already freely available why would anyone buy it? If you sell information that isn't currently available then yes you will annoy a lot of people. ϢereSpielChequers00:16, 26 July 2015 (UTC)
Logged-out users see fundraising requests off and on during the year. I believe it displays on about one out of every hundred pages (more often if you clear cookies regularly). There are also some geographic restrictions, so not all IPs will see them. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:51, 29 July 2015 (UTC)
I am also strongly opposed to this. Even if it is totally opt-in, the news that this program is starting would create a huge scandal and worry a lot of people about Wikipedia "selling out" and going to the dark side, etc.
I also think that Wikimedia has for a long time been a bastion of Internet freedom. The supposed goal of the site is to make knowledge accessible to all (as opposed to "walled gardens" and "bubble effect" of search engines), to free people through knowledge (as opposed to manipulating them into buying things) from decentralized sources (individual editors as opposed to the monopolistic data companies that OP's policy would directly benefit), where everyone can contribute (as opposed to not contributing because you fear the site will track you), it would be very counterproductive and counter to the core ethos and mission of Wikimedia to in any way officially promote or condone surveillance culture. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 98.221.142.150 (talk) 23:38, 4 August 2015 (UTC)
Ideas toward a guideline on emoji page titles
Latest comment: 9 years ago19 comments9 people in discussion
Over the last little while at redirects for discussion a number of redirects from single emoji characters have come up, and this has highlighted a few technological issues which makes it difficult to properly target these. Up to now, it's been generally accepted that emoji target to the topic they're intended to depict (e.g. 🍎 -> Apple), and this works fairly well most of the time. Broadly, there have been two issues identified:
For some emoji, it's not definite at a glance what they're intended to depict, either because the drawing is complicated for the available resolution (e.g. 🐲), or because the idea being represented is itself difficult to isolate to a single Wikipedia page (e.g. RfD on 👯), and so a target is not easily chosen.
Some emoji do not render the same on every system. An extreme example is playing out at the RfD on 👾, which is a character which might look like a bug-eyed monster, a glyph from the video game Space Invaders, or a grey alien, seemingly dependent on the reader's operating system and/or browser (read through that thread for the wide variety of things our editors think this emoji looks like).
There is a list of emoji at Emoji#Blocks which lists the emoji coded into Unicode and which should therefore render on Wikipedia as I understand it, but many are not clear representations of things, and try the list on your desktop vs. your phone or some other device and you'll see how some are completely different on different platforms. However, you'll also see that nearly all of them have had pages created for them which redirect to an article. This creates problems for us because we can't guarantee (like we can with words) that a pictorial representation is going to be interpreted a certain way by all users, or even that it's going to be the same picture, and so we are creating WP:ASTONISHing redirects for some users.
I have an idea for a WP:EMOJI guideline in my head, a guideline for how to deal with emoji pages, and I'd like to hear other users' perspectives on this issue. Here are some of my thoughts thus far:
Many (possibly the vast majority of) emoji are unambiguous (e.g. 🍎, 🎧, 💯) and the unambiguous target should be the target of an emoji redirect.
For less clear emoji, often the Unicode character name gives a clue as to what the glyph is intended to depict (e.g. 💢 is called ANGER SYMBOL and targets to anger) and so an unambiguous target can be chosen.
For even less clear emoji, sometimes the Unicode name doesn't provide any help (e.g. 💸 is called MONEY WITH WINGS, which doesn't have an obvious target; 🖎 is called LEFT WRITING HAND and doesn't render on my system) and so they are best left unlinked, or perhaps as redirects to emoji.
For emoji which render differently on different systems, such as 👾, and such that the various images depicted represent different possible targets, I think that these may also be best left unlinked, or perhaps a new class of disambiguation pages could be created. The various different things that 👾 might depict to different users are things which we have articles on.
There have also been a number of users at the various RfDs suggesting that we should just not have pages with emoji titles at all, often citing WP:FORRED and considering emoji essentially a foreign language. I'm against that treatment myself, because I think that emoji redirects can be useful, even if it's not obvious how one goes about typing one in a search box (this may become easier in the future, I don't know) and one of the criteria at WP:RFD#KEEP is that someone finds a redirect useful, even if you don't; different users browse Wikipedia in different ways.
I suppose I'm most interested in thoughts on the last two points: what to do with emoji which aren't obvious, and which might not be the same for all users.
I think the rendering issue is even worse than thought; take a look at this list of emojis (which includes the "Space Invaders" one and many, if not all of the ones mentioned), they all render differently depending on the font (for example, compare 🎱 to its page on that site (this differs enough for a discussion in my opinion), and 🏫 looks completely different, albeit still obviously a school). When I set my browser (Firefox) to override the page's font settings, they all become coloured and look slightly different. I think this could defeat the purpose of all emoji redirects. Adam9007 (talk) 02:27, 7 July 2015 (UTC)
Okay, most others (if not all) look pretty similar or clearly refer to the same thing, but it's pretty interesting nevertheless. I imagine most people aren't aware that their appearance is dependant on a number of factors, including fonts. This reminds me of Wingdings and Webdings, both of which (if I'm not mistaken) are Microsoft-specific and don't work on non-Microsoft software. People inserted WIngdings/Webdings characters unaware that they are Microsoft-specific and believed they were actually inserting that character into the document. I think this case is similar if these emojis render differently depending on system and font. Adam9007 (talk) 03:24, 7 July 2015 (UTC)
A quick question: Do people actually search for articles on Wikipedia using emoji? And if it is the case, what are the general numbers, how often is this the case? If these redirects are genuinely used, then I can see the usefulness of such redirects, but if the converse is true then the redirects seem to be vanity inclusions. --benlisquareT•C•E06:38, 7 July 2015 (UTC)
Well on occasion I have done a search on Wikipedia when I come across a strange character. Redirects should be based on a reliable source though, not on what an editor imagines it looks like. If there is no sources, then it may as well redirect to the Unicode section that includes that code. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 06:51, 7 July 2015 (UTC)
Fortunately, this doesn't come up often enough to probably need a whole page. But I think a section at WP:RFDOUTCOMES might be a good idea—this is almost exclusively an RfD issue, after all. I'm leaning more and more against the idea of emoji redirects at all. Even if page views show that people are using them, I remain highly skeptical. First, because we could delete 🍎 and probably everyone who was using it would still know how to get to Apple; second, relatedly, because I doubt many people searching for 🍎 actually don't know what an apple is. Even when people are navigating with these, I don't think they're functioning as search terms as such. They're really more like Easter eggs—do many readers even know how to generate these characters? I don't.
Ultimately, I don't see any harm in 🍎 and the other no-brainer characters, but the others are too troublesome IMO. I'd prefer to delete them outright, but redirecting to Emoji or soft redirecting to Wiktionary might work, assuming a given character is included there. --BDD (talk) 13:34, 7 July 2015 (UTC)
The idea of just deleting all of the emoji redirects has crossed my mind too, but I think that past discussions have shown that these are considered useful in the same way that some other unusual redirects have been shown to be in the past; the fact that people are using them (against all odds, apparently) means that they're of some value. So I guess we weigh the usefulness for this set of users versus the work of maintaining the redirects, but that's where a guideline would be helpful I think. Ivanvector🍁 (talk) 19:15, 7 July 2015 (UTC)
I wonder if it would be helpful to have a List of emoji, which would list the emoji along with their Unicode value and description from a reliable source. I'm not sure that such a list can be created without being a copyvio but it could be used as a target for the more ambiguous emoji. Example:
Then it wouldn't really matter how they render for different users, because they would see a descriptive list of their emoji regardless, beside reliably-sourced data about them. We could determine redirect targets (or delete them) based on that. It could be like a two-step redirect (not unlike a soft redirect) or a form of disambiguation. Ivanvector🍁 (talk) 14:35, 7 July 2015 (UTC)
Is it possible to change the font here? The glyphs look different depending on the font used; these versions should also be added to the list for comparison. Adam9007 (talk) 14:39, 7 July 2015 (UTC)
I'm not sure that's the best approach, since if users were entering emoji into the search box here as I understand it they'll see system fonts, so we could be then showing them things they don't expect. Or alternatively they enter an emoji into the search box which uses a customized font which doesn't show them the same emoji. Ivanvector🍁 (talk) 19:11, 7 July 2015 (UTC)
Another point to discuss is whether or not these emoji redirects constitute redirects from a foreign language because they're not English. FORRED is an essay but consensus generally follows it, at least in my experience. The thought is that a redirect such as bureau de poste -> post office would not be useful for English-language readers, so we shouldn't have one. So then should we have 🏣 as a redirect? On one hand, it's patently not English, but at the same time it's a symbol (for Japan Post) which would be recognizable to some English readers, because as an image it would be recognizable to some readers in any language. I'm not sure. Ivanvector🍁 (talk) 19:39, 7 July 2015 (UTC)
I am not sure that FORRED is a major issue at this point since the post office symbol is the only case so far where Itnhad come up as a case for deletion and in that case a new target Japanese Postal Mark has been suggested.--69.157.254.210 (talk) 01:41, 9 July 2015 (UTC)
As an admin who's been closing many RfDs on emojis, I'll summarise the direction we're heading towards:
We generally delete any emoji redirect which has ambiguous meaning; (cf. "confusing" of RfD deletion guideline)
We generally delete any emoji redirect whose meaning, even if unambiguous, can point towards multiple topics on Wikipedia; (cf. WP:XY)
However, if the emoji's meaning fall neatly within the scope of a disambiguation page, it should redirect to that disambiguation page.
WP:FORRED generally doesn't become the critical argument, because it's easy to argue that if the emoji unambiguously points towards one topic, then the topic has some affinity with the emoji.
I'll add an extra suggestion: We should only keep emoji redirects if the perceived meaning agrees with the official Unicode definition of the emoji. I hope we can agree on a convention with emoji page titles in general. Deryck C.22:38, 12 July 2015 (UTC)
Thanks Deryck, there's some points here I hadn't considered. There was some talk of disambiguation, which I assumed meant creating a new dab page at the emoji, rather than just redirecting it to an existing dab, which makes all of the sense. Ivanvector🍁 (talk) 21:49, 13 July 2015 (UTC)
Latest comment: 9 years ago3 comments3 people in discussion
It could be great to be able to create timelines based on specific (personally investigated) trajectories - to enable users to make quick comparisons/draw parallels/look for patterns in time. I propose a 'wiki-timeliner' project / code addition that would allow users interact with temporal wiki info very simply.
Perhaps right-click and context menus could be implemented in a code update - which could simplify a number of other wikipedia interactions. Perhaps some context (right click) options could be attached to temporal data/hyperlinks. Or maybe timeline tools could exist in the regular editing toolbar. I would imagine there are modal window solutions / tooltips / keystroke options that might also be reasonably usable.
Wiki Timeliner or 'Timeliner' functionality would allow users to:
create timeline pages (whose content is mainly organized in the context of a timeline)
add relevant timelines to individual pages
to add data from pages to the timelines of other pages (creating interlinking between subject matter)
and hopefully to compare timelines in their own sandboxes or export some kind of csv/xml/graphic timeline output
Additionally, page edit history could be optionally displayed in the context of a timeline.
If there is enough consistency in wiki page construction, timelines could be auto-generated in pages with a lot of temporal info just to illustrate the data already on pages.
Oversight & maintenance would be subject to the same community editing process to which all content is subject.
Timelines with too much disputed info would just not display (or would display with major disclaimers) until a community resolved its disputes - so that oversimplification of important ideas would not be likely.
There is already a list of timelines - most of which are well made and canonically quite important - but I bet there are a TON of other important timelines that could be helpful to people, specifically if formatting them is very easy.
@Lightloaf: Are you talking about some kind of script that would make it easier to create timeline pages? Or perhaps so better way of organizing related events? I wonder if m:Wikidata might help you with this. Oiyarbepsy (talk) 05:38, 4 August 2015 (UTC)
The basic idea sounds quite useful as an external tool, but I have one minor quibble. Some of us do not allow websites to hijack our right-click context menus. If possible use checkboxes or radio buttons instead. --Guy Macon (talk) 15:40, 4 August 2015 (UTC)
How do we actually encouraging vandalisms and how to fix this
Latest comment: 9 years ago5 comments5 people in discussion
Sorry for the length of this post. Still I think it is a worthy read.
As an ex-vandal (I sadly must confess) and an ex-admin I think I do have a considerable view of the problem of vandalism, from both sides of the barricade.
To clarify: as a vandal I mainly wasn't active on Wikipedia, but rather different smaller wikis not related to Wikimedia, and sometimes some forums. And I hope this was long before enough.
And I gotta say your methods dealing with it are ineffective at most! It is ridiculous that people got to stare in the screen for hours playing Whac-A-Mole with vandals to prevent the site being flooded; it is ridiculous that sophisticated tools have to be developed just for this purpose! Do not be deceived by 'Pedia's popularity – while this is undoubtedly a significant factor, I'm positive the current flood is far too large to be explained just by popularity.
No, all of those public discussions, info and intervention pages, complaints, RFCc, public logs… You're asking for this yourselves! You have wise and enlightening pages like w:wp:DENY, w:wp:TMOAV, w:wp:RBI, but you don't practise your preaches. In the dark times I was vandalizing myself, I'll tell you, when I was seeing a FRACTION of all of this I was bursting out laughing uncontrollably! Why do you think do vandals always keep their style and leave traces? Because they WANT to be recognized, of course. You're just a one huge canteen for trolls. And again, I'm telling this from the perspective of an ex-vandal.
As a result of this people have to direct a large fraction of their energy to combat trolls, rather than help newbs, fix errors on pages, etc. Vandals' harassment techniques and burdensomeness make some productive users to grow in frustration and eventually leave. Newbies are being scared off, some fraction of the sneaky vandalism passes uncaught.
As an admin, I've been fending off vandals long enough; and I don't really wanna to be doing this again. I simply have a too big feeling of the utter pointlessness of my efforts. I'm tired of fighting it in such a way that I know my actions are actually counter-productive.
In this case Wikipedia's openness works against it. Do understand that vandals really do crave to see any impact of their actions. That's their goal, their reason to vandalize! When I was vandalizing, I was waiting for the results and looking for them, staring at the RCs, reading certain meta-pages and users' discussions…
That's not the way at all. The vandals' actions, from their perspective, should go to a black hole or /dev/null. No impact of their actions should be visible to them. Reverting, Blocking, Ignoring is important, but it's not enough. All pages like w:wp:LTA or w:wp:AIV should be removed from the public and be made visible only to trusted users. Also any discussions, RFCs, etc about them should be held somewhere unreachable by vandals (but reachable by all good users, not only admins). There should be consensus not even to mention their nicks in the public, even less to complain about their disruptiveness. Obvious vandalisms should not only be rollbacked; no, the vandalized versions should be removed from the page's history, at least from the vandals' perspective. The right to do so could be granted to anyone with the rollback right. If you ask me, I'd say the vandals should not even see who has blocked or reverted them; also the block reason should be left empty. Again; when I was vandalizing, I was sticking to pages that responded in a Wikipedia-like manner. If I saw a page that was removing traces of my vandalisms and made it impossible for to witness the results of my actions, I was going elsewhere.
Please learn from the experience of other sites, where this is exactly what is happening. On StackExchange banned users do not see their deleted content. On many forums vandals are just being arbitrary banned by they-don't-know-who, and their posts are being deleted. By the way, perhaps StackExchange's privilege system is worth considering?
By the way, I know I'm somewhat not practicing my preaches myself by publishing this very essay. But I really think this must be brought to attention.
Finally, it is important that I was talking only about die-hard vandals. These methods should never be applied to hot-blooded users, users that are just suspected of being vandals in disguise, etc… I am aware of Bang Bang's case, AFAIK there was not only one such mistake in the history, and well, I am in no way promoting this kind of hasty administrative actions.
Thanks – good, thought-provoking essay, and IMHO worth discussing. But let's discuss it at only one place, not three!
For a start, I'd suggest considering some changes arising from Marcgal's valid points. For a start, is it possible to make a general block to prevent unregistered or new users from editing anything except articles and perhaps article talk pages? That might limit vandalism of other name spaces, expecially Wikipedia: and Wikipedia talk:.
Similarly, there seems no particular reason for article history to be visible at all to unregistered users?
Most unregistered editors are not vandals, so hiding the revert comment from them may end up being counter-productive. Perhaps then it would be useful to whitelist the IP addresses of positive contributors? Whitelisted IP addresses could then be treated much like a regular editor. Praemonitus (talk) 16:11, 10 August 2015 (UTC)
Latest comment: 9 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
Internet is developing and people can find a lot of information everyday but there is still a long way to go. I am currently spending time in Iran/Tehran and have feedbacks about my current Internet Service Provider. Due to the close market and some other problems, there is no official website for people like me to read/write about the service they're using.
I am pretty sure there are a lot of countries out there that tourists and domestic people don't have a board to guide others.
If wikipedia adds a ranking system on companies like ISPs, small or even large manifacturers and etc, also a feedback/comment page for known users I am sure that it will benefit millions of people around the world. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Amirhrahal (talk • contribs) 16:22, 12 August 2015 (UTC)
Hi @Amirhrahal: Thanks for your feedback. I've been to Iran a few times actually - and I do remember the sometimes unfortunate internet situations I had there. That being said, Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, an we aim to provide a neutral point of view to our readers. In other words, we write our articles so that they fairly reflect what reliable sources say about a subject. The best Wikipedia coverage I can find on Iran's internet industry is at Communications_in_Iran#Internet, which discusses Iran's internet history, infrastructure, ISPs, and statistics. This article could always be improved, but only based on what reliable sources say - not personal experience.
Our readers come to Wikipedia expecting a fair encyclopedic view of a subject; allowing people to insert their own opinions and experiences with businesses would go against our goal. We call that original research and don't allow it. To put it short: we're not a business directory. There are websites out there that are specifically made for people to provide reviews of businesses; I suggest exploring those options, or coming up with a way to expand those options to involve the market you're looking at (as I know the options may be limited for Iran and many other countries). Thanks! ~SuperHamsterTalkContribs18:25, 12 August 2015 (UTC)
Redirect problem!
Latest comment: 9 years ago13 comments7 people in discussion
I posted it at Wikipedia:Help desk#Wildlife, fauna, flora. Now, I realized this is a better place for it. This is a food for thought to improve Wikipedia. To be honest, I would be careless whatever happens. I'm just happened to discover this mess today and wanted to do something about it. Obviously, the problem does not limit itself to just wildlife, fauna, and flora. This is a much bigger problem on Wikipedia as a whole. Wikipedia has been plaguing by articles under-disguised as redirects. I suggest that there should be a policy banning "creating potential future articles as redirects." I do realize there is a pro to this kind of redirects, but the con's surely outweigh it. I have stated my reason in the help desk (check out the link). Here it is, I have no interest in further involving in Wikipedia. I'll leave the rest for policy-makers here (which I know is all Wikipedia editors). That is if this is getting anywhere at all. 14.169.206.102 (talk) 09:11, 8 August 2015 (UTC)
I don't see the problem. Such redirects, particularly to near duplicate alternate titles such as "Flora of X" and "Wildlife of X" help readers find the actual article, and do no harm that I can see. DES(talk)10:56, 8 August 2015 (UTC)
Redirects are useful, articles are better, but if we don't have an article on something but there is a logical place to redirect them to why not have a redirect? ϢereSpielChequers11:04, 8 August 2015 (UTC)
Indeed, and once an article is written you can always replace the redirect. So I do not see the problem either. Arnoutf (talk) 11:31, 8 August 2015 (UTC)
I didn't want to repeat myself, so before saying there is no problem, you should take a look at this link Wikipedia:Help desk#Wildlife, fauna, flora (I listed above already, but now, I list it again to point it out). I included my reasons in there as why keeping redirects does more harm than good. You guys can choose to ignore the problems, but saying it isn't there is quite wrong. Take note that: the problems only concern with redirects that are potential future articles, not those redirects that forever will be redirects. 14.169.206.102 (talk) 18:20, 8 August 2015 (UTC)
@Ottawahitech Of course it is not that black and white. There are 2 reasons why not (1) You can replace a redirect with an article if there is sufficient support that the article deals with a topic that is sufficiently notable to have an article on Wikipedia. Any article that is not notable is to be removed, which in this case would lead to reinstating the redirect. (2) Also, if the new article shares its name with one of the names of a much better known topic (even if this only the colloquial and not the official name) the redirect should stay in place, or an ambiguation page should be created. For example the French village Us does not get the article name US (which redirects to the United States of America) but can be found under a more specific name Us, Val-d'Oise or US (disambiguation).
As far as I could see with your specific example Linda Pinizzotto. This article has been deleted (and redirected) because of lack of notability (Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Linda_Pinizzotto_(2nd_nomination)). So that means current consensus is that the topic does not warrant an article. It is up to you to achieve consensus change BEFORE you can create the article. This has nothing to do with the fact that the deletion was done by changing the article into a redirect, but all with the question whether that article should exist at all (as standalone article). In short, this is a clear case of the first reason when a redirect cannot be replaced with an article wihtout prior community consent. Arnoutf (talk) 09:52, 13 August 2015 (UTC)
Ottawahitech, Arnoutf. Like I said before, this discussion only concerns with redirects that are potential future articles, which means redirects that can be replaced by new articles for sure. I'm suggesting a policy that prohibits the creation of such redirects. I agree that there is a pro to those redirects, but I also listed out many problems that outweigh the benefit. Please read my words carefully (I hate repeating myself). 14.169.145.48 (talk) 20:43, 13 August 2015 (UTC)
My problem is that such a policy is unworkable. For example if we consider an intern in once of the presidential campaign teams. Based on the current status of that person, no article is warranted, but a redirect to that presidential campaign may be warranted (at this moment in time). However, this same intern may become the president of the US in a few decades (at which time an article would definitely be warranted)- but that is no reason to forbid any such redirect right now. So the claim that any (potential) future article should block a redirect is unworkable.
If I use a "softer" interpretation of your suggestion and interpret it as: "redirects are prohibited for any articles that pass notability criteria at this moment in time" - it would be even more problematic. Since Wikipedia is a volunteer effort we cannot demand that full articles are written about all notable topics. Your proposal would result in the utter absence of many relevant terms from Wikipedia that right now are at least covered by redirects -e.g. a specific species of animal might be sufficiently notable for a future article, but in the absence of a full article about the species a redirect to the genus or family would be preferable over no mention whatsoever. Arnoutf (talk) 20:53, 13 August 2015 (UTC)
Conversely, over at redirects for discussion, discussions often result in existing redirects being deleted if the topic stands a reasonable chance of having an article written about it, in order to encourage writing of the article. It's true that anyone can overwrite any redirect with an article at any time, but having a redirect in place already often discourages it. I don't think having a policy against creating them will help the situation, though. Ivanvector🍁 (talk) 21:26, 13 August 2015 (UTC)
So it seems we are looking for a solution to a problem that either does not exist, or at least is already solved I guess. Arnoutf (talk) 12:05, 14 August 2015 (UTC)
Members of the community are invited to give their thoughts at a request for comment to discuss Wikipedians' alternatives to consensus, and the formation of a proposed Regulation Committee. Thank you, --ceradon (talk • edits) 04:20, 2 August 2015 (UTC)
Latest comment: 9 years ago5 comments3 people in discussion
There's actually an entire Wikimedia incubation project at incubator:Incubator:Main Page. Maybe one of the possible results of an article nominated for deletion should be getting transwikied there instead of just going into Wikipedia's Draft namespace when it doesn't meet Wikipedia's quality standards as described in Wikipedia:Deletion policy#Incubation but can be rewritten to do so. That Wikimedia project is probably more collaborative than Wikipedia's draft namespace and so would probably do a better job of improving it. Blackbombchu (talk) 00:58, 20 August 2015 (UTC)
The Incubator project is for ideas for new projects, not articles. To explain; Wikipedia is a project for building an encyclopedia using wiki software. Wiktionary is a project for building a dictionary using wiki software. Wikisource is a project for preserving source material using wiki software. If a person has a idea for a new project, they take it to Incubator. If a person wants to write a draft encyclopedia article, they do it on Wikipedia. ~ ONUnicorn(Talk|Contribs)problem solving17:40, 20 August 2015 (UTC)
@ONUnicorn: Another possible idea might be to have Speedy deletion Wiki articles copied into Wikipedia's Draft namespace with attribution when there's a chance that the Wikipedia article it was copied from can be improved enough to be worthy of undeletion. I see that people are already contributing to Speedy deletion Wiki articles a lot more often than before, so Wikipedia might get the added benefit of extra contribution by Speedy deletion Wiki editors who don't contribute to Wikipedia's Draft namespace. Blackbombchu (talk) 20:18, 21 August 2015 (UTC)
That Wiki copies articles that are in danger of being deleted here. Many of them are declined drafts to begin with. Why would we want to copy something we had deleted from draft space back to draft space? ~ ONUnicorn(Talk|Contribs)problem solving20:28, 21 August 2015 (UTC)
Most of the drafts deleted can come back on request. So you can ask at WP:REFUND if you see anything you like. Serial requesters that don't improve the draft may be questioned what they want to do, as we don't just want to store them without improvement. Also AFDed articles could be turned into drafts depending on the reason for the delete. You can ask for that action too. If we do do restores that retains attribution. Copying from another wiki poses problems for attribution. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 21:46, 21 August 2015 (UTC)
3RR tracker helper
Latest comment: 9 years ago14 comments7 people in discussion
Idea: Some optional thing to help UserBob avoid 3RR violations. Support for it in user prefs is probably unwarranted. Elements:
An up arrow that Bob can click when he does a revert that he feels falls under 3RR.
A down arrow that Bob can click if he clicks the up arrow by mistake or in error.
A display of the current number of 3RR reverts Bob has performed within the past 24 hours.
A display of the time when the oldest will fall off the list; i.e., the time of that revert plus 24 hours.
All elements always visible at the top of the window.
Re the down arrow, the software would assume that Bob is reversing the most recent up arrow click. If he wants to reverse an earlier one, too bad, he should have thought of that before he clicked up arrow again. ―Mandruss☎19:59, 3 August 2015 (UTC)
IMO, this would give the appearence that 3RR is an entitlement; the page makes it explicit that this isn't the case - "the rule is not an entitlement to revert a page a specific number of times". עוד מישהוOd Mishehu20:13, 3 August 2015 (UTC)
True. So the question becomes, which is more important ... (1) to avoid giving that appearance, which is, as you say, already clarified in policy, or (2) to save an editor having to constantly track their reverts or risk being taken to ANEW because their mind was fully occupied by Wikipedia editing and last night's argument with the wife. My answer is (2). I think if 3RR is going to exist, and "Sorry, I lost track" is not an airtight defense, we have an obligation to make compliance reasonably easy to do. ―Mandruss☎21:10, 3 August 2015 (UTC)
It's not simply counting to three. It's keeping track of when it's time to decrement the count because a revert became 24 hours old. We shouldn't be required to maintain a running written log. ―Mandruss☎21:20, 3 August 2015 (UTC)
Not at all. It's easy to do more than three reverts in 24 hours, without ever reverting vandalism and without edit warring. There are righteous reverts, the ones that protect the article from clearly bad editing (distinct from vandalism) and disruptive reverts. If the community recognizes that as the criterion, if each situation is evaluated independently of number of reverts, then 3RR is both useless and misleading and should be eliminated. ―Mandruss☎12:49, 4 August 2015 (UTC)
It might be simpler to build something automated, that tells you how many times you've hit the undo button for a given article in the last 24 hours. Upon your fourth click, it could give you a warning, at which point you could investigate whether you were about to break 3RR. I doubt that it comes up often enough that investigating this when necessary would be a burden. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:50, 10 August 2015 (UTC)
I'm inclined to go with Old Mishehu. If your editing style involves that many reverts and you're carrying the process on over more than one day, and it isn't obviously the result of a robustly collaborative back-and-forth...then yeah, it's hard to see how you're not edit warring. If an article is suffering from enough "clearly bad" non-vandalism edits that you're coming close to 3RR, then you need to be seeking outside assistance (and perhaps an independent assessment of the degree of badness), not trying to singlehandedly stem the tide. Any editor who comes to rely on the sort of 3RR timer you've described will almost certainly end up sanctioned for protracted edit warring, no matter how good his intentions. TenOfAllTrades(talk) 18:26, 10 August 2015 (UTC)
TenOfAllTrades, I happened to look a bit of his work a couple of weeks ago, and his edits were correct. If you deal with BLPs who are in the news, then you can easily encounter more than a few good-faith BLP violations to remove from a single article. It's nice to have some help, but the fact is that one person removing six BLP violations is not "worse" than two people removing three each. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:49, 11 August 2015 (UTC)
WhatamIdoing, I'm sure you know that 3RR covers all non-vandalism reverts, not just the undo button.
But anyway, in the end I don't really care provided I'm never hit with a 3RR sanction for doing my job in good faith, and I haven't been yet. It's a solution in search of a problem for me, to date. That's why I posted here rather than at WP:VPR. Thanks for the feedback. ―Mandruss☎19:28, 10 August 2015 (UTC)
It's a solution in search of a problem? Maybe so. In my case when I am faced with editors who keep reverting my edits, I tend to simply walk away instead of wasting time being dragged into the wp:dramah boards. Ottawahitech (talk) 22:46, 12 August 2015 (UTC)
@WhatamIdoing:, WP:BLP contains an explicit exemption from the 3-revert rule for the removal of BLP violations. And if an article is actually seeing 6 or more additions of BLP-violating material over the course of a single day, the solution probably isn't to get a second person to do more reverting—it's to look at interventions like semiprotection, protection, editing restrictions, attention from WP:BLPN, blocks of editors who persistently violate BLP, or the imposition of discretionary sanctions. (Seeking outside assistance doesn't have to mean recruiting additional edit warriors.)
If an article is seeing a large amount of BLP-violating (or other problematic) activity, trying to edit war it into submission solo is the wrong way to go, because it doesn't protect the article after you go to bed. TenOfAllTrades(talk) 20:12, 11 August 2015 (UTC)
I do appreciate the negative concerns about this idea but I'll throw out one additional positive one. Some articles are under a 1RR restriction and in some cases this isn't permanent but temporary. An edit in my watchlist going to the article making revert, seeing it reinstated and reverting again without making sure to check to see if it's a 1RR article. If this concept were built into software, it can automatically detect an article which is in a 1RR status, and it would let you know after your first edit that you are at the limit. I know people are supposed to check to see if 1RR applies, but it is fairly rare and I can easily imagine someone missing it. This could help. I don't know that this positive aspect overcomes the other negative aspects, but it's something to consider.--S Philbrick(Talk)02:54, 25 August 2015 (UTC)
Wikipedia needs a new section for laymen
Latest comment: 9 years ago8 comments8 people in discussion
Hello, I am Del Wilkins, and I consider myself a fairly intelligent person who has significant knowledge on topics that I find interesting, just as any other person who does the same. I wanted to add a link to the page Shadow person that had to do with a study on the effects of Methamphetamine and sleep deprivation. I could not figure out how to properly enter and edit the link. I know it is a lot like writing a college paper and citing your sources APA style, but its been many years since I have done any of that type of writing and could not figure it out. This is why there should be a place for a person to write new information. place the links, and leave it there until someone comes along who knows how to enter it. I feel that without such a storage area, Wikipedia is losing out on a wealth of untapped information that can only be contributed by people who have it, but do not know how to enter it. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Del Wilkins (talk • contribs) 11:45, 21 August 2015 (UTC)
In addition, the editor could add the comment to the article talk page. I encounter quite a few people who write to Wikipedia with suggestions on how to improve an article but they do not have the interest and/or ability to directly edit the article. I often encourage them to add there comments to the talk page, which other editors can then convert into a proper citation and add it to the article.--S Philbrick(Talk)02:32, 25 August 2015 (UTC)
Seconding Sphilbrick's direction to add to the article's talk page. This is the most appropriate place to put content you suggest be added to the article, but you're not quite sure how or where it should be added. I've done this from time to time myself. --User:Ceyockey (talk to me) 02:42, 25 August 2015 (UTC)
Help from Harvard Catalyst
Latest comment: 9 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
I think Wikipedia could greatly improve if Harvard Catalyst helps research how to improve it. Harvard Catalyst could probably do more than just contribute to Wikipedia based on their research results. I think Harvard Catalyst would even be able to research how to form a group of people who edit Wikipedia in a swarm intelligent way including researching which patterns to create a software to notice within the entire Wikipedia website. Blackbombchu (talk) 01:19, 25 August 2015 (UTC)
Two ideas: undo button and saved drafts
Latest comment: 9 years ago6 comments6 people in discussion
When editing an article a few minutes ago, my cursor made an unfortunate move and deleted a large block of text, which forced me to exit the edit window without saving my changes and re-add the text I was typing. I'm sure other editors have had the same issue, so why don't we simply fix this problem (which could become very inconvenient if you happen to make this mistake while adding large amounts of content or copy editing) by adding an undo button to the editing bar? I don't imagine that it would be an incredibly difficult feature to add, and it would certainly make reversing mistakes much easier.
Secondly, it occurred to me that it would be useful to have a saved drafts system. For instance, if an editor is making changes to an article but does not yet wish to make them live, they could simply save their progress as a draft which would be visible to only that editor. When they are satisfied with their changes, they can save their edits to the article itself. I recall that wikiHow, which I previously edited, had this ability, and it was quite convenient. --Biblioworm16:09, 3 August 2015 (UTC)
I don't think your changes in the edit box are communicated to a server. Browsers usually have an undo feature, with short-cut Ctrl+z on Windows. I don't know whether a website can add a button to activate a browser's undo feature. PrimeHunter (talk) 16:19, 3 August 2015 (UTC)
Copy the article to a sandbox, do the editing there, then paste the finished version into the mainspace. Or am I not solving your problem with this? BeenAroundAWhile (talk) 22:16, 6 August 2015 (UTC)
Re: the saved drafts idea, User:Biblioworm, this one has popped up before. :) I just wanted to let you know that as I understand it this would not be a change to make lightly. I asked Stephen LaPorte, who said that there are different rules for handling legal demands for private communications, so we would need to assess how the feature works and then potentially adjust our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use accordingly. We would would also need to review what sort of moderation system is appropriate for private drafts. For example, would admins be responsible for policing drafts for problematic content (and does that mean that they are actually "private")? There may be ways to build a private draft system that avoids the legal questions entirely. If it's built, we'd need to be sure that legal stayed closely involved. --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 18:59, 11 August 2015 (UTC)
Re: saved drafts. I may be completely missing the point here; but if I'm understanding correctly, it sounds like Biblioworm would like to be able to save a draft of something still under development, and in such a way that no one else can see it. If that's the goal, then why not just edit your wiki code locally with a word processor and save it locally on your hard disk. You can always see how the wiki code will display by copying and pasting it into your sandbox and hitting "Show preview." I believe it remains completely private as long as you don't hit "Save page." That might involve an extra step or two, but it would accomplish the goal. Richard27182 (talk) 06:12, 18 August 2015 (UTC)
Strongly Support Undo ButtonWhen I edit out and about on my iPhone, the keyboard doesnt allow me to press Ctrl+z. And this is the case for most others who edit on their phones and tablets running ios or android. This has been the mlst frustrating issue for me when editing and I couldnt believe that there wasnt one. As for the other proposition, I never use drafts on other sites so I dont really have an opinion on that. Tortle (talk) 02:41, 26 August 2015 (UTC)
Capturing Encyclopedic Knowledge before it dies.
Latest comment: 9 years ago7 comments6 people in discussion
Dear Wikipedia Policy Makers
I am a historian by training and an enthusiast about old things, be they classic cars, bicycles and other mechanical stuff from the 20th century. I am writing to encourage a new class of encyclopaedic information on Wikipedia - retention of specialised non-academic human knowledge. In specific I am writing about collector cars, although the class can extend much further. In essence, while some subjects have formal experts, such as university professors who publish, in popular culture, such as classic cars, the knowledge is held by enthusiasts who build up a lifetime of expertise that unfortunately dies with them. It needs to be captured and recorded, and no better place than Wikipedia.
I propose that an officially approved format be set out on Wikipedia so that present-day living knowledge carriers can post that knowledge in the permanent repository of Wikipedia. Yes, anyone can post such now, but because anyone can purge such work, unless it is officially sanctioned and set out in an approved form, there is a very great risk of a volunteer editor messing with what is invaluable historic knowledge because they don't think it belongs there.
In regard to cars, I propose the following format:
Sub-Sub-Sub category. For example, instead of Alfa Romeo Spider, permit 1969 Alfa Romeo US-Spec 1750 Spider. This particular sub-sub-sub class has some very unique aspects to it because in 1968 Alfa was panicked by the new US pollution regs and it lost a lot of money by installing a 3-D mechanical fuel injection system used for racing, that it sold at a loss to comply. There is one guy in Seattle WA USA who understands this, not only the historic fact, but actually what is involved. He's getting old. When he dies, the knowledge dies, but the cars will still be there as historic treasures. Allow the knowledge writers to get far more specific than Alfa Romeo, or Alfa Romeo Spider. Then the enthusiasts will contact the Seattle guy and ask him to enter all his knowledge into the database.
History Self evident
Important Personalities related to the car (designer, key factory persons, living or dead, influential people related to the car, books etc)
Details of the sub-sub-sub category car (similar to a parts and repair manual in terms of headings). This is especially important for mid-year changes, very small runs, etc.
Original Part Numbers and all cross indexes and well as other cars using the same part (usually this is a table with alphameric entries and descriptions, divided into heading such as engine or brakes). This also includes other cars that used the same part... very common in European cars where the Alfa part is the same as Mercedes, Opel, Ferrari, etc. This is of especial importance when someone is trying to look up what to look for.
Service: Proper removal, replacement and repair instructions, as well as "work around" instructions that come from experience. This is similar to a shop manual, except (a) old shop manuals tend to be hard to find, (b) the aftermarket manuals are too general and (c) professional expertise often finds better ways to service a vehicle than the original book.
Detailed photographs of parts, including in-situ installation. This is especially important - a picture is worth a 1000 words.
Factory original colours, accessories, etc.
Known specialist shops around the world. This is delicate because an encyclopedia is not supposed to be advertising, but such shops actually are more like art restorers than businesses.
Permitted variations (in cars qualified for historic races, period changes, such as disk brakes from a related model, are allowed in the race, for example)
Alternatives (for example, original size tyres become discontinued... what will be a workable replacement. One day gasoline will become extinct... a how to pull the engine and retrofit an electric drive might be a legit alternative)
Imagine if Wikipedia existed when the Pyramids were being made, or when the Romans invented concrete that lasts 2,000 years (ours is lucky to last a century). Imagine if the makers of Polaroid film posted their knowledge on Wikipedia when they stopped making it commercially. For that matter, imagine if Wikipedia was a repository for early computer program knowledge... stuff from the 20th century that now has been long lost. There is so much human knowledge that is slipping away, especially when email replaced letters and web pages replaced books.
I imagine this could become a powerful project... the knowledge project that brought in a whole new breed of specialist editors. But my sense is that it will require a clear agreement rather than just sort of happen.
I think you're misunderstanding what Wikipedia is. We only aggregate material which has already been published elsewhere in reliable sources, and don't publish personal knowledge and how-to guides. What you're describing is a blog, and would be such a radical departure from every other WMF project that they would never authorise it under the Wikipedia/Wikimedia name. (Google did try something like what you're suggesting with Knol, incidentally. It was not as successful as they hoped.) ‑ iridescent14:23, 15 August 2015 (UTC)
Sigh.
I figured I would get replies like this from people who quite miss the point. I am not describing a blog. I am describing knowledge that is documented by manuals that are disappearing, photographs that do not lie, and explanations that, despite your view to the contrary, is at the heart of Wikipedia. I recommend you read Wikipedia:About "Users should be aware that not all articles are of encyclopedic quality from the start: they may contain false or debatable information. Indeed, many articles start their lives as displaying a single viewpoint; and, after a long process of discussion, debate, and argument, they gradually take on a neutral point of view reached through consensus." "The ideal Wikipedia article is well written, balanced, neutral, and encyclopedic, containing comprehensive, notable, verifiable knowledge."
Further, I recommend you read Encyclopedia "An encyclopedia or encyclopaedia (also spelled encyclopædia, see spelling differences)[1] is a type of reference work or compendium holding a comprehensive summary of information from either all branches of knowledge or a particular branch of knowledge.[2]"... "Encyclopedia entries are longer and more detailed than those in most dictionaries."
I am proposing that comprehensive, notable, verifiable, detailed knowledge be captured in a single encyclopedic repository that can evolve over time as different contributors refine the knowledge so that it is useful. The point you are missing is that knowledge always comes from the human mind, and the role of an encyclopedia is to distill and record the knowledge without the dross so that the knowledge is accessible by other human minds. But human brains, the physical holder of that knowledge die, and all that is left is the written word.
A manual that accompanied a new piece of technology can provide, for example, the part number and a description of how to fix it. However, if the manual is in printed form, over time, the number of copies disappear, and while it may be locatable, it is no longer accessible. Further, if the manual calls a widget a widget, but no one knows what the widget looks like anymore, because what once was obvious no longer is, the important knowledge is lost. However, if a person with decades of experience enters that knowledge into Wikipedia, they may include those little details that the manual left out. They may include a photo that shows what it looks like. They will add to the knowledge in the same way that many Wikipedia articles evolve. Wikipedia is not a photocopier.
This is not a game, but a serious problem faced by civilisation as we know it. The shift to computers has created a very vulnerable knowledge base that can be wiped out in a nanosecond. On the other hand, Wikipedia serves an important role in protecting that knowledge and providing instant global access... if the detailed knowledge is there from the beginning. But when one looks for detailed knowledge, among some Wikipedia volunteer editors there is a mentality that has a bias toward newspaper reports, books, scholarly articles, and in many cases recycled ignorance. This is, in my view, the heart of the problem. It is a problem of elitism, white collar vs blue collar, certificates carrying more weight than experience.
For example, if I quote a series of newspaper articles, that may be deemed encyclopedic even though reporters are notorious for spreading false information - engaging in recycled ignorance. Why? (1) Because the reporters are under a deadline to deliver copy. (2) Their bosses understand that they are a commercial enterprise that makes its living by selling the news, so the reporters select stories and words that sell copy. (3) Because reporters are not experts, but generalists who must digest a lot of information in a short period of time; they just get it wrong, but they get it in print. And because it is in print, it ends up in Wikipedia, even though it is recycled ignorance.
A similar problem exists with scholarly articles, as with scholars it's publish or perish. One must have a new position, a new discovery, a new interpretation. It is not unusual for a whole field of academia to hold on to incorrect or erroneous knowledge and not let go until its proponents, who defend their position with their tenure and position, die. Indeed academia can be a brutal place, intellectually dishonest, with ego and power distorting the pure pursuit of knowledge. Yet it gets a free pass in Wikipedia because it is in print, and the author holds a doctorate or prestigious position.
The knowledge base of experience is just as valid as reported or elite knowledge, indeed perhaps often more valid, because it is based on constant reality checking. Toyota discovered this on the factory floor when it stopped valuing engineers theoretical position papers over the blue-collar worker who actually had to run the machine day-in and day-out. As a result, Toyota became the top car manufacturer... their cars were more reliable.
That is the issue I am raising with Wikipedia, that it examine its own policies to make sure that it does not bring a certain set of blinders that in fact is inhibiting its core purpose.
In particular, I am asking for (a) that there be more detailed categories permitted, and it is agreed this is appropriate, so we don't have some overly-enthusiastic editor harass it, delete it, consolidate it. (b) that a format be set out with particular subheadings so that the detailed knowledge base follow a specific form, rather than have one article read one way, and the next read another.
I have selected a particular subclass - older cars, but similar forms are appropriate for many different sunset technologies where their underlying knowledge base, especially technical knowledge, is otherwise lost.
While I sympathise with the issues you're raising, I think Wikipedia is the wrong venue. A quick search online shows that there are a whole load of websites which already catalogue manuals, for example. Equally there are already perfectly competent repositories and archives of images, newspapers, and other such sources. I have little to no argument with the issues you're raising, but Wikipedia isn't the right place. Sam Walton (talk) 21:15, 15 August 2015 (UTC)
My thoughts are that (a) what you are proposing seems a valid objective for a project, and (b) Wikipedia isn't the place to do it. Like it or not, we have policies and guidelines concerning what we consider appropriate content for an encyclopaedia, and on what sources we consider appropriate to build such content on. You are proposing a fundamental reshaping of Wikipedia policy, and to be frank, not making a very good case for it. Certainly, newspapers can 'recycle ignorance' - but so can your 'living knowledge carriers'. And certainly 'intellectually dishonesty' can be found in academia - but I see no reason why one should assume that 'living knowledge carriers' are free from such dishonesty either. We cite the media and academia not because we know that they are always right, but because we know that there are at least checks and balances in position to rectify the worst of their errors - to the extent that this is possible in an environment where few 'facts' are so objectively true or false that what is or isn't an error can always be determined at all. What you are proposing is that we base content on the personal knowledge of individuals subject to no formal checking. And that is something that, by clear consensus amongst the Wikipedia community, we do not do. I personally tend to the view that the purpose of a system is what it does, and that the purpose of Wikipedia is to produce the sort of content it does, according to the policies and guidelines it has in place. That is what has made it what it is - and is what has made it the success it is. Yes there are problems - but none of these problems are likely to be solved by reducing standards, or by attempting to change it into something fundamentally different. Our 'core purpose' is to carry on doing what we have been doing. Because that is what our readers are looking for. And fundamentally, Wikipedia exists for the readers, not the contributors. Readers who apparently place a trust in our content (sometimes too much trust) because we have made it clear that we try to base content on verifiable sources. Having said that, while I would strongly oppose the sort of changes you are proposing to Wikipedia, I might suggest that you could instead look at our sister Wikiversity project, which has a different purpose, and differing standards regarding sourcing of content. They might very well be sympathetic towards a project aimed at the systematic collection of 'specialised non-academic human knowledge', and are in a strong position to provide the resources to do so. AndyTheGrump (talk) 21:34, 15 August 2015 (UTC)
I would consider wikipedia to be the ultimate destination for the information, however as the others ahead of this have pointed out, you need to source your information. But that is doable. You mentioned your expert on Alpha Romeo. If you can post what he knows, you can also parallel that with known sources. His knowledge might fill in the gaps between the facts that other sources report and that content would be subject to scrutiny by others. But the point is, with some work, you can support the key points of your prose and that knowledge, the glue that might tie these facts together, will become a valid wikipedia article. Simply put, your guy in Seattle did not learn what is happening in a manufacturing plant in Italy by osmosis. Your guy should also know where and how he got his information. A car that is distributed world wide is not a secret. The decisions made in a corporate board room might themselves be secret, but you can find reports of market trends to support statements of what and why. There has to be some other supporting documentation available, technical manuals, news articles. It will take work. Put together the package and you can make your content encyclopedic. Trackinfo (talk) 00:57, 16 August 2015 (UTC)
I partially agree with this proposition. I do not believe that wikipedia is for all the little technical info like all the specs of a car that might be in a hard to find manual. But as an enthusiast of old things, I have done a lot of painstaking research and come up with very hard to find info. that would be well preserved here. So I think that this would be useful but just not for the small stuff that doesnt have a place here. Tortle (talk) 02:54, 26 August 2015 (UTC)
Add my village on Wikipedia
Latest comment: 9 years ago4 comments3 people in discussion
It is the village where live muslim and hindu.there is situated a madarsa where lern hindu and muslim.and i think its indias firat tobacco free village. Sarfraj siddiqui is well known person for riting bhatauli tarana.bhatauli meri jaan.it is first village in india which has own tarana or anthem. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 106.67.59.148 (talk) 21:25, 24 August 2015 (UTC)
Ill see if I can find info on your village and if I can, I will create an article for it. But I dont think that this is the place to ask something like that but I dont know where you would in the future either. Tortle (talk) 03:06, 26 August 2015 (UTC)
I looked for any infornmation and sadly, I couldnt find any and wihout sources, I cant create an article. If you have any sources, please let me know on my talk page but otherwise, there isnt much that I can do. Tortle (talk) 03:11, 26 August 2015 (UTC)
Latest comment: 9 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
With the increasing popularity of image collage's on historical and current event pages - especially wars - I feel that there should be a specific policy regarding this. I have noticed that several times in the past few years users have posted collages on War in Afghanistan (2001-present) and Iraq War which have been far from appropriate in my opinion, and to a degree still are. The problems entail the types of images used in the collages and their composition which I feel lacks objectivity. For one some users tend to over-represent one side in the collage's, generally I am referring to coalition/Western forces in these kinds of articles as many of the Wikipedia editors on this site are from those countries. These users may be predisposed to over-representing them in a collage compared to the opposing side. This isn't a good thing because if a reader is looking for information on the war when they first begin reading the page the collage should preferably have both (or sometimes more) sides represented equally so that the user can more easily envision the two sides of the conflict when they are reading the article.
The other problem I have is that for the most part a lot of these collages tend to just become a bunch of pictures of soldiers with no real context as to what they are actually doing in the war. To be honest this probably bothers me more than the aforementioned point. Then entire point of Wikipedia is to provide information, and just posting a bunch of pictures of people in the war doesn't do that. Instead events should where they can be represented in the first image on the page as it will help in illustrating the key events of the war before the reader starts and to be honest will also help build more interest in Wikipedia's articles than a bunch of pictures that looks like they are pulled from a military recruiting site.
This is a bit of a controversial topic, maybe it is redundant and people should know better with WP:NPOV but I feel it would be better to have a clear policy on this as I have had to do a few reverts to these articles over the years which have been nothing but controversial I feel. --Kuzwa (talk) 00:26, 28 August 2015 (UTC)
A Proposition
Latest comment: 9 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest comment: 9 years ago10 comments7 people in discussion
Hey all, I brought this up at the Gender Gap Task Force a while back, and thought I'd bring the issue here for more brainstorming and possible solutions. User:Sue Gardner wrote a very interesting blog post by , where she discusses how being referred to by the incorrect personal pronouns can put women off of editing and give examples. So I thought it would be a good idea to try and figure out some possible solutions to this problem. I brought it here instead of coming up with a proposal, because I don't really have any experience in Mediawiki technology or being a woman on the internet. In the GGTF discussion I suggested adding template:gender to the editing toolbar so that editors would be more likely to use it. User:SlimVirgin came up with the idea of having a hovercard feature for usernames, which would show some personal information about an editor if enabled in preferences. Do these seem like things which could help? Would they actually be possible to implement? Brustopher (talk) 22:07, 6 August 2015 (UTC)
A number of the concerns raised by Sue Gardner can also be issues for male editors as well. For example, I now tend to avoid VA-type pages because they seem especially conflict ridden. That perceived adversity may be why so many VA articles are in poor shape. Praemonitus (talk) 20:56, 7 August 2015 (UTC)
In the basic issuse of referring to other editors by a preferred pronoun, one can use {{pronoun}}, {{he or she}} or any of several other similar templates. These all trigger off the preference item where an editor can indicate a choice of male, female, or non-gendered pronouns. I now always use one of these when referring to another editor with a pronoun, unless I already know that editor's preference clearly. DES(talk)11:00, 8 August 2015 (UTC)
Hi Brustopher, I think it's a good idea. Perhaps you could contact someone from the Foundation who works on these issues, or who worked on the hovercards. Sarah(talk)18:36, 9 August 2015 (UTC)
This feature idea might be suitable for WP:NAVPOP, but isn't really suitable for Hovercards in its current form. The current version of Hovercards is purposefully restricted to only work on links to mainspace pages, and it is intended to be purely a quick preview of mainspace pages. (The very long-term plan, is to overhaul Navpopups and integrate it with Hovercards, as "advanced/basic" versions of the same idea (whilst retaining the advanced functionality and info-dense appearance of Navpopups in the advanced version, and avoiding the problem of slowly turning the "basic" form of Hovercards into a duplicate of Navpopups)).
For example: Navpopups already has a line at the bottom, on links to userpages, for details about editors including their usergroup flags and first-edit date (e.g. http://i.imgur.com/WAfHAbm.png) This is similar to the details that the userscript User:PleaseStand/User info adds (screenshots there), except that script also adds the "mars/venus" symbol (see the Jimbo example screenshot) if the userpreference for gender has been set - Perhaps the code that is doing that (?) could be re-used in Navpopups? Hope that helps. Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 22:23, 10 August 2015 (UTC)
Whenever I need to refer to an editor by a pronoun, I always check the user's User: page for an indication of gender; and assuming it's specified, that's the gender I use. (Or occasionally their gender is obvious by their choice of user name (such is the case with me)). Otherwise I feel the "generic he" is quite adequate. I feel if someone is really sensitive about being referred to by the correct pronoun, then they should indicate their gender on their User: page. Perhaps the routine that handles the creation of new accounts should encourage the soon-to-become-an-official-Wikipedian to provide that piece of information. Richard27182 (talk) 09:04, 20 August 2015 (UTC)
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Ideas for slowing down vandalism
Latest comment: 9 years ago6 comments6 people in discussion
I have some ideas for eliminating at least 15% of all vandalism as predicted, and I have a good reason to share them with you. Vandalism is like bombs which were set to destroy Wikipedia, which is usually repaired by non-vandals, but that is not just why because we all know that Wikipedia is not meant to be vandalized. I have some suggestions here:
For logged-out users
It is a good thing that we can keep track of registered users very easily, but people from anywhere can make edits, including vandalized ones, which is harder for us to keep track of, and they can always use another computer or change their IP addresses to keep vandalizing, which makes things even harder for us to keep track of, so, so that we could better take a peek at what people had done and therefore keep track of their attitudes, logged-out users would be allowed to edit up to 20 times per day but still allowed to revert their own edits anytime.
For recently unblocked users
It is usually expected that Wikipedians whose blocks have been naturally lifted be better contributors than they were in the past. However, it is not always known as to whether they will continue to act inappropriately, so, just to reduce taking chances, the users would be allowed to edit up to 20 times per day for one week, still being able to revert their own edits, until one week has passed since their being unblocked unnaturally.
Your opinions
So, after having said my ideas, I would love to hear some of your views about my ideas. If you do not like them just enough, do not be afraid to tell me why, for I may be able to fix my ideas. Your opinions start now. Gamingforfun365(talk)07:18, 20 August 2015 (UTC)
I think any kind of rate-limiting is a really bad idea. It would unduly affect good IP editors. There is a long-standing fixed IP editor (whose number I cannot at the moment recall) who is so productive that many users have failed to persuade them to get an account. Also IP use is a way into editing: before registering, I did anti-vandal work as an IP and would have been miserably hampered by your proposals. As for recently unblocked users, some users do things (like repetitive typo fixing) which use up lots of edits so rate-limiting would effectively be an extra week's block. It might be helpful in some cases but not as a blanket proposal.
For recently unblocked editors, why not treat them like a new user and revoke their autopatrolled and autoconfirmed status? Praemonitus (talk) 16:48, 20 August 2015 (UTC)
I'm thinking that rate limiting could be a good idea. I don't think it would be hard at all to white list any IP who chooses to continue contributing as an IP and is productive. I consider something well short of 20 edits. Limit an IP to five edits per day. On the sixth edit, they get a message explaining the limitation but also explaining that they can ask for the limit to be removed. This should be done as a very very low hurdle request. If their first few edits are not vandalistic, up the limit. Someone, sometime, will try to gain the system but they can only get away with it once.--S Philbrick(Talk)02:42, 25 August 2015 (UTC)
I think that rate limiting would be good but I agree with Sphilbrick in the idea that they should be able to contest it so that way it would have minimal effects on the good faith editors. Tortle (talk) 03:01, 26 August 2015 (UTC)
The Rate limiting idea seems to assume that we have no more than one editor per IP address. But we know that one entire country funnels its internet through one IP. ϢereSpielChequers07:42, 3 September 2015 (UTC)
Come see the New WikiProject Wikipedia!
Latest comment: 9 years ago4 comments3 people in discussion
I think Wikipedia will improve even more if we find a way to convince the public that Harvard Catalyst could do a really great job of collaborating to improve Wikipedia, and that Wikipedia information is so useful that it will be better for society in the long run if Harvard Catalyst is funded by the government to do so than if it isn't, instead of us just participating in Wikipedia:WikiProject Wikipedia. Blackbombchu (talk) 21:09, 2 September 2015 (UTC)
You are in no position to award 'charter member' status to anyone - as far as I can tell, you haven't even participated in the project.
Harvard Catalyst is already funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) program. [5]
The objective of Harvard Catalyst is to increase collaboration in the field of human health. As such, it has nothing whatsoever to do with the objectives of WikiProject Wikipedia. It may possibly be of relevance to Wikipedia:WikiProject Medicine.
Ah - that explains the apparent disconnect between the initial notice and Blackbombchu's post - I've struck the no-longer-relevant comments. AndyTheGrump (talk) 22:00, 2 September 2015 (UTC)
Creating an algorithm for determining dead sources
Latest comment: 9 years ago6 comments5 people in discussion
Hi guys.
In an ongoing effort to improving Cyberbot II's newest feature which is, placing archives on dead sources, detecting if untagged sources are dead, and archiving those that are still alive, the bolded feature still needs much work before I can enable it.
I am looking for users here who can propose different checks that can be put in an algorithm to accurately determine a dead link.
When proposing, create a new level 3 header and propose the algorithm to be discussed. Users may support or oppose, but remember we are simply compiling ideas at the moment.—cyberpowerChat:Online19:53, 2 September 2015 (UTC)
How about the bot finds the latest archived edition that's different, in the case of dead links? For example, here I substituted an older edition of the (second) page because the latest archive was broken too. Eman235/talk04:29, 3 September 2015 (UTC)
N-grams
If I understand you correctly, one way to do this would be to collect a large sample of dead link responses, then use some sort of AI to check if the response you get is enough "like" the sample to be considered a hit. N-grams (character-level trigrams probably) and approximate string matching may be helpful for this. —SMALLJIM09:54, 3 September 2015 (UTC)
Existing bots and tools
There may be algorithms, or code, that are useful, on the following pages, particularly the first:
What purpose would such a template serve? People adding or removing categories with hotchat are not going to see it. ϢereSpielChequers18:33, 4 September 2015 (UTC)
If the category is too narrow then you're implicitly saying that we should get rid of it. Sure, that can happen and have CfD for that. If the category is narrow but otherwise completely fine, why would you want to tag it? Pichpich (talk) 01:42, 5 September 2015 (UTC)
Motion: AUSC Extension
Latest comment: 9 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
The Arbitration Committee is currently examining several reforms of the Audit Subcommittee and asks for community input on how they would like to see the Subcommittee function in the future. Because of this, the current Audit Subcommittee (AUSC) members' terms are hereby extended to 23:59, 30 September 2015 (UTC).
Limit patrolling to reviewers (and possibly an extra patroller group)
Latest comment: 9 years ago10 comments7 people in discussion
As has been brought to light in the Orangemoody case, but as was already known and discussed before that, allowing any autoconfirmed user to patrol articles makes it somewhat easy to bypass new page patrolling (see the sock Akashtyi (talk·contribs) for example). The system could be made more robust by restricting 'patrol' and page curation to (pending changes) reviewers (admins implicitly included), and possibly a new 'patroller' group with lower requirements than reviewer (there are some active patrollers who aren't reviewers). On the other hand, there are regular complaints against 'over-zealous' new page patrollers, so moving this userright from 'autoconfirmed' to usergroups that can be added and removed from a user would provide an incentive to behave in this area. It might also become a technical requisite for accepting AFCs. Cenarium (talk) 18:41, 2 September 2015 (UTC)
Sure, this sounds good. (Note that I'm a reviewer myself, though I wouldn't oppose if I weren't.) Patroller group is a good idea too. Eman235/talk04:13, 3 September 2015 (UTC)
This has all been pre-empted (before Orangemoody) and a major RfC is currently being drafted to be launched soon (not by me, for once) that coincidentally almost perfectly addresses the points made here. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 07:26, 3 September 2015 (UTC)
It's a fine idea as long as it doesn't result in a growing backlog of pages to be reviewed. It's time-consuming and takes knowledge and skill. There's going to be an interesting trade off if we go this route: quality vs. quantity. NPP is our first line of defense, obviously, and a good review can save hours of editor time down the road. Jusdafax the 09:52, 3 September 2015 (UTC)
It won't create a backlog. If anything, it would reduce it, because having a nice pointy piece of headwear to go with it will be a magnet to the hat collectors. But they'd have to jump through some much tougher hoops than mere PC reviewers, most of whom were granted by a bot several years ago. My empirical experience from chasing wannabe page patrollers round the site for the last 5 years tells me that good reviewers need almost as much clue as admins if they are going to detect Orangemoody kind of stuff. Even AfC with the 500/90 bar that I introduced can't get its job done without constantly having to ask each other what to do and constantly trying to invent new bots to do it for them. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 11:46, 6 September 2015 (UTC)
I agree it takes a clue to do NPP properly (I have been hit by the clue-bat a few times and I hope each time it has made me a better editor) it is, however, one of the better ways to get a clue about what is and is not a good article. What I think is needed is some sort of feedback mechanism to let good faith NPP know what they do right and what they do wrong. Most of the feedback we get is in the form of complaints from promotional and COI editors when their article is tagged with CSD. This new feedback mechanism need to strike some compromise between inclusionist/deletionist views as well as fix it vs tag it. That is if we want to use it to grow good NPP editors. In simplest form it can be more people doing what Kudpung does and review the reviewers. If we want to prevent sock self patrolling that is going to be a bit harder. Whatever regime we set up a dedicated commercial enterprise can find a way around it. It would take some time to work up an account with whatever "NPP reviewer" user-right but it is trivial when there is money on the table. At that point our best option is tying the user right to the Terms of Use by saying anyone with the 'NPP user right' may not receive compensation for their editing (with the usual carve outs for GLAM, WiR, employees of the Foundation etc.). As to detecting Orangemoody type things that requires either mentoring or a lot of experience. AGF ties our hands because we are suposed to deal with each new editor as a naive but well-intentioned person who just needs some proper guidance and each NPP must figure out how to manage that. I have never seen anything that tells us how to spot and deal with bad-faith paid editors etc. If we try to figure it out we are called 'deletionist' and 'over-zealous' which sooner or later leads to people giving up or becoming ass-holes with a smaller number figuring out how to manage on their own. Of course giving guidance on recognizing articles being pushed by puppet-farms will become useless almost as soon as they are posted. It would be so much easier if we just had a WP:CABAL controlling NPP :) JbhTalk13:02, 6 September 2015 (UTC)
If an editor could easily sign up for (and resign from) notifications of AfDs in areas in which they are currently interested, similar to how WikiProjects can subscribe to Wikipedia:Article alerts, then I think that's a good idea. —SMALLJIM16:19, 9 September 2015 (UTC)
Latest comment: 9 years ago4 comments2 people in discussion
Some articles (example) have several notes in a row: ...text of the article.[10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24] and maybe Wikipedia could / must automatically show them as: ...text of the article.[10-24] or something similar. Ayreonauta (talk) 06:21, 15 September 2015 (UTC)
Two things that, combined, I think make that unnecessary. WP:CITEKILL talks about citation overkill. I'm fairly confident that your example case is a serious case of citation overkill. If not, it's a very rare exception case. And ref stacking, which combines multiple citations into one reference. ―Mandruss☎06:27, 15 September 2015 (UTC)
Not knowing much about the subject area, I hesitate to remove any refs myself. But I went ahead and stacked six of those refs in this edit, reducing the number of citation numbers from 15 to 10. You can add more to that stack, create one or more additional stacks, or revert me, as you deem appropriate. ―Mandruss☎14:40, 15 September 2015 (UTC)
I get it, and thank you very much for the info. I still think that when it happens, just for readability, could be shown other way. Maybe like "[10][11][+]", where clicking on "[+]" reveals the subsequent numbers. Nothing serious anyway. Ayreonauta (talk) 04:24, 16 September 2015 (UTC)
Error for refname collision
Latest comment: 9 years ago4 comments2 people in discussion
When an article contains a refname collision (same refname defined multiple times, with like or unlike definitions), (1) the software uses the first definition and ignores the rest, (2) there is no indication of any problem given in the reflist, and (3) the article is not added to any tracking category. All are evident in the test in this revision, using the refname "Blinder-Lewin", which is citation [7]. Apparently this is being treated as a minor, innocuous problem, but it is not one in my opinion. It can create issues with WP:V among other things. If the collision is ever detected, it's often some time later (years?), and by a different editor who is not well familiar with the article or the sources used. Yesterday, I spent over an hour untangling a particularly hairy case involving one refname, two unlike definitions, and four cites, and it was the toughest thing I've done in quite awhile (granted, it didn't help that the ref title was incorrect in one of the definitions). It is a less serious problem if the definitions are identical, and I wouldn't necessarily ask the software to compare the definitions, but I think the downside of no error in the serious case (WP:V issues, more editor effort to fix) is greater than the downside of an error in the minor case (big red error in the reflist, which might be seen by some readers until the problem is fixed). I think an error message should be generated in the reflist, and that the article should be added to an appropriate tracking category. But I wanted to get some feedback on this here before taking this to WP:VPR. ―Mandruss☎06:20, 13 September 2015 (UTC)
This does sound like a software bug (or omission). It seems obvious that a refname should occur with content once only, so multiple occurrences with content should generate an error. Agree that it would be neat if the software could detect repetition of the same content and flag that less loudly. Stanning (talk) 16:33, 13 September 2015 (UTC)
@Stanning: (or anyone) Thanks. You used "content" where I said "definition". I don't know, is "content" a widely used term for that? If so, I'll use that if I go to VPR, for maximum clarity. I also invented the term "refname collision" here, and the same goes for that. ―Mandruss☎04:11, 14 September 2015 (UTC)
@Mandruss: Um, sorry, I just used "content" for no particular reason, not because it's a term of art that I know of. There probably is an official term in HTML for what comes between an opening tag and a closing tag, but if there is I don't know it. WP:NAMEDREFS says the syntax to define a named footnote is <ref name="name">content</ref> whereas WP:CITE says <ref name="name">text of the citation</ref>. Whatever you say in VPR, someone will misunderstand if they can, so whether you say "content" or "definition" it'll be best to make it clear that, by that word, you mean the text between the ref and /ref tags! Stanning (talk) 14:02, 14 September 2015 (UTC)
Public transit stop list
Latest comment: 9 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
What exactly would patrolling deletion nominations entail, or are you just proposing we encourage more users to vote in AfDs? Sam Walton (talk) 18:34, 20 August 2015 (UTC)
It would draw more attention to those article deletion discussions that otherwise would have gotten so little attention, some of which didn't draw attention to patrollers because they weren't proposed for deletion first. Blackbombchu (talk) 18:40, 20 August 2015 (UTC)
So essentially a drive to point out discussions which aren't receiving enough input? There's definitely an interesting idea here, perhaps similar to the way editors are messaged to vote in RfCs, but with a focus on AfDs with low participation? Sam Walton (talk) 20:44, 20 August 2015 (UTC)
I guess this could work like this; users opt-in to a messaging service (in the same way that Suggestbot or the RfC bot work), and receive some amount of notifications per period of time regarding AfDs which have reached their 4th or 5th day with less than one or two votes. Sam Walton (talk) 21:08, 21 August 2015 (UTC)
An "opt-in notification service" of some kind to solicit input in AFD discussions lacking participation would be fine; @Esquivalience: I would be opposed to a bot moving transclusions up and down a page, unless it was given a separate page of its own or implemented as a "sort function" to allow users to affect only their view of the page. I quite often check discussions (listed by date and time added) that I have commented in or have interest in, or I'll get through a few on the list and come back later; the order plays some role in my memory of them. If the discussions shift positions on occasion, while it's an interesting idea, I think it would have undesirable effects. Whether or not the benefits would outweigh them I'm not sure, but I would definitely have to adjust my methods considerably. I would support a page that lists discussions lacking input in the manner you suggest separate from the current system (perhaps broken down by day as well or simply the last seven days combined).—Godsy(TALKCONT)08:08, 23 August 2015 (UTC)
I think that we ought to scrap AFD entirely, and re-create it as a purpose-built system that actually handles the whole workflow from start to finish.
Imagine an AFD tool that has simple forms to fill out for the nominator, that never sees nominations get "lost" due to transclusion problems, and that automatically counts !votes and tracks how many separate individuals participated. Imagine one that notices when a page is ready for closing (i.e., because it meets our standard criteria, such as having ≥3 participants and being 7 days old, or whatever we decide), and that puts the page into a list or category for action. Imagine one that could sort or filter by any criteria that you care about: the most attention (maybe it's SNOWing?), the least attention, only BLPs, only articles tagged by my favorite WikiProject, etc. Imagine one that can be withdrawn or closed by clicking a few buttons with a built-in script (including direct access to page deletion for admins and maybe a scripted blank-and-redirect button for everyone), rather than having to type special codes into a template and separately processing the page.
Yeah, that would be an improvement. Currently, there are regular complaints about the process being overly complicated. Maybe a gadget or a gadget-bot combination might serve to create such a system. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 18:39, 28 August 2015 (UTC)
I think the process of nominating articles for deletion and having well researched deletion discussion pages can be made better by Wikipedians collaborating in a complex way, and I think the only way that's going to happen is if Wikipedia accepts help from Harvard Catalyst which will do a lot of participating in deletion discussions. Blackbombchu (talk) 20:49, 2 September 2015 (UTC)
No, WhatamIdoing, it would be a whole lot worse. Perhaps you have forgotten over the years of not particpating on that area that AfC is a discussion not a vote. It should be kept as complicated as possible to deter newbie NAC from experimenting with it. We also already have the fully automatic AfD tool, but that's also embedded in NPP which you told me years ago is a superfluous process.Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 11:57, 6 September 2015 (UTC)
I believe that you meant that it's supposed to be a consensus-finding process rather a numeric vote, but (a) both admins and NACs are actually closing these as votes, and (b) keeping a tally of the votes doesn't force an admin to delete on that basis. My bigger concern is about getting people to nominate suitable articles, and to let interested users know about the nomination. If you still want to close manually, then that's okay with me. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:28, 6 September 2015 (UTC)
I think the problem of some deletion discussions getting so little attention can be solved by having a way to patrol the relisting of deletion discussions. However if that change gets made, Wikipedia should also make another change of having a policy to ban editors for relisting a deletion discussion that's less than a week old so that there won't be greedy people trying to get a certain deletion discussion more than its fair share of attention. In addition to that, for each deletion sorting Wikiproject, there should be another deletion sorting Wikiproject only for relisted deletion discussions for that category. That way, experienced editors can easily decide to only participate in relisted deletion discussions, giving relisted deletion discussions quite a lot of attention by experienced editors. Blackbombchu (talk) 17:56, 18 September 2015 (UTC)
Latest comment: 9 years ago6 comments5 people in discussion
What would people think about implementing some kind of software that allows users who can't edit a semi-protected article to edit it similar to pending changes, however the edits wouldn't "go live" until any auto-confirmed user accepted the change? This would make semi-protection much less forceful and encourage editing, rather then dealing with the wiki-markup, talk pages, and templates that go along with semi-protected edit requests? I feel like there's some kind of objection to this, or it would have been implemented in the past, so, what are those? Kharkiv07 (T)01:32, 23 September 2015 (UTC)
I would not be in favor of making these tweaks to semi-protection. We often get articles hit with sustained vandalism (e.g., when a celeb does something stupid) and editors should not have to spend hours hitting revert. --NeilNtalk to me14:18, 24 September 2015 (UTC)
As Sam Walton said, this would basically be implementing a "pending changes level 0". I don't think this is necessary or even desirable. If there are no beneficial IP/new account edits a page can be semi-protected, and if there are then PC1 can be used. The backlog at Special:PendingChanges is never egregious, so PC0 would not be a workload benefit. Also by not screening the editors who accept the change the system could be gamed. Having yet another type of protection would just mean more bureaucracy and squabbles about what level should be used when. BethNaught (talk) 14:26, 24 September 2015 (UTC)
I generally oppose making anything harder for those who are willing to edit as auto-confirmed users in order to better accommodate those who are not. The way to "encourage editing" is to encourage registration. Semi-protection is only one of the many good reasons to do so. ―Mandruss☎14:30, 24 September 2015 (UTC)
Have Afd deletion log appear in first deletion nomination of an article after a second nomination gets made
Latest comment: 9 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
The WikiProject for a major topic area seems to be dead
Latest comment: 9 years ago5 comments4 people in discussion
It's been a long time since any post to WT:WikiProject Engineering has received a meaningful reply. Imho there are certain projects that are "too big to fail". For a major topic area such as engineering to not have a functional WikiProject is a serious problem. I think we could convert the main WikiProject Engineering page into a type of "disambiguation" page that lists active projects that cover various sub-topics of engineering - chemical engineering, electrical engineering, etc. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 08:08, 16 September 2015 (UTC)
Sounds like your the new de facto head of Wikipedia:WikiProject Engineering. Some comments: Just because nobody is using the talk page, doesn't mean that nobody is using the project's main page. You can try changing the main page. That might bring people out of the woodwork. I don't know if I'd change the main page too much though. Maybe adding a header notice using {{mbox}} or something would be sufficient. Jason Quinn (talk) 15:37, 22 September 2015 (UTC)
I cleaned the front page for sanity's sake. Some weiiiiiiiiiird floats going on there due to the unclosed tables. --Izno (talk) 15:56, 22 September 2015 (UTC)
Pageview statistics for all articles created by a user
Latest comment: 9 years ago11 comments7 people in discussion
I was thinking about how to personally mark the 5 millionth ENWP milestone, and this idea occurred to me. What have been the most popular articles I've created, by all-time pageviews? It's a sort of long list so I'd rather not gather the data by hand. Is there a tool that can do this? — Brianhe (talk) 17:43, 23 September 2015 (UTC)
I think the tool is just really slow, Panyd? You had 47.610 Total views in 2015-08! Since i don't create new articles on enwiki (but redirects that i already forgot about) it works faster for me. --Atlasowa (talk) 14:01, 25 September 2015 (UTC)
Took tens of minutes to run on my account. Apparently after creating a few hundred articles / redirects this kind of check is maybe not a great idea. Only just barely missed hitting 500k views though (495,064 in 2015-08). Dragons flight (talk) 14:39, 25 September 2015 (UTC)
I knew most of the articles I've actually created were way out in the long tail of reader interest, but wow, this is embarrassing! I'd also really like to know who linked to my top-viewed article to make the traffic look like this: who are all these people suddenly interested in flying ice cubes? Opabinia regalis (talk) 21:08, 26 September 2015 (UTC)
Latest comment: 9 years ago9 comments4 people in discussion
Hi All,
I've been working on visualizing editor behaviour on wikipedia over the past few months. I've put together graphs that visualize editor activity, retention etc. I made a presentation for the research team at the foundation - http://slides.com/cosmiclattes/edit-activity-graphs-analysis/. It also has some of the preliminary results. It has links to the graphs & says how to interpret & play with them. Please let me know if you guys have other metrics or ideas you'd like to see graphed. I'd love to hear what you guys think of the graphs. I have proposed an IEG to continue working on the graphs.
I feel like we've known how this works for years, but nobody wants to confront it - instead, we'll just keep compiling numbers on it to make ourselves feel like we're doing something about it. Samsara14:40, 4 October 2015 (UTC)
Besides insights on editor retention/longevity etc which are well known already the analyses have interesting inferences about how long an article stays actively edited (I don't yet have the data for en, every other big wiki, after about 2007, most of the articles only see activity for a month or 2 after creation, then they hardly see any activity). Also I have noticed cyclical editing patterns in wikis like de etc. Jan-Dec sees a spike in edit activity. Retention rates amongst very active editors(100+ edits/month) sometimes show more active editors than who joined, meaning to say some people with lesser edit activity become more productive in their second month (I haven't put up theses graphs online yet). These analyses are not solutions, but could help us get more insights into macro editor behavior.--jeph (talk) 05:28, 5 October 2015 (UTC)
In the last 2 years we've seen a slow but important uptick in editor activity on the English Wikipedia, after several years of declines. Personally, I'd like to understand that shift with an aim towards identifying the origin of the improvement (and perhaps gain insight into how we might be able to do even better). A simple first step is probably to pull out the changes in new editor registration, changes in editor activity of existing editors, and changes in editor retention. My personal suspicion is that most of the uptick is due primarily to growth in new editors, but I'm not entirely sure. Dragons flight (talk) 10:44, 5 October 2015 (UTC)
Hi Dragons flight, Some of the graphs that are up already are:
Editor Cohort Longevity - Shows the longevity/retention of a given editor cohort in a month.
I haven't looked at user registrations yet. Some of the other ideas I'm working on are here and here. Would you have any specific ideas for me or directions you would like me to explore?jeph (talk) 12:47, 5 October 2015 (UTC)
Those displays are visually attractive, but in that format I have trouble getting at the information I would want. For example:
What is the trend in editing for new editors? (Total edits in 1st month of editing, 1st year of editing, etc.)
What is the trend in editing for established editors?
How has short-term editor retention changed, e.g. the trend in new editor percentage that keep editing after 6 months? 1 year? 2 years?
How has the percentage of edits from new vs. old accounts changed through time?
How has the number of newly registered accounts changed through time?
How has the 1st edit conversion rate changed (i.e. fraction of registered accounts that actually edit)?
How has the fraction of editors going from 1 edit to 10 edits changed? From 10 edits to 100 edits? From 100 edits to 1000 edits?
(4) could be answered by the graphs mentioned above(Monthly Editor Activity Split By Cohort - Values, Monthly Editor Activity Split By Cohort - Percentage). Let me know if it doesn't.
I haven't yet looked at (5) & (6).
I'm working on similar lines currently, I'll put them up when they are done.
Creating a more efficient system for semi-bot-solvable tasks
Latest comment: 9 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
Hello! I'm currently incubating an idea that was initially discussed in the Wikipedia IRC channel (log).
I've been cleaning up citations with missing "|title=" tags, and it occurred to me that while this task likely couldn't be automated, it could certainly be made more efficient for the editor - rather than going through each category page, clicking "edit this page", etc., what if a program could populate a single page with several of these citations pulled from one or more pages? The editor could then click the links, provide a suitable title in a text box below each citation, and then submit them all at once. After that, the editor could get another page of citations to fix if they so desired. If you've ever used Amazon Mechanical Turk, they have a system for digitizing documents that works in a similar way - each document is split into images that contain one line, then workers are presented with a page that has several of these images and are asked to type the text into boxes below the images.
Rhhhh, another user, expanded on this idea - perhaps a program similar to the "random page" function could be added, but it would be modified to send users to a random page or section that requires cleanup, combined with subject selection (Rhhhh said "[for instance], 'I want to fix [spelling/POV/markup/...] on pages about [language/IT/history/...]' ")
While coding and scripts are completely out of my depth, I feel like this is something that wouldn't be too difficult to implement and it would allow editors like myself who prefer to work on these smaller tasks to do so far more efficiently.
new namespace: Chronicle, for recording events comprehensively
Latest comment: 9 years ago15 comments9 people in discussion
I have an idea for a new namespace to be entitled "Chronicle." It would be a place to note or record all events or items within a particular area. doing so would allow us to create a common space and resource where historical events could be noted and referenced, without requiring us to change the regular historical articles to record new events before their eventual significance is fully understood.
currently, there is no centralized place to create a central narrative of events as they occur.
one major potential of wikipedia is to serve as an ongoing and evolving record of events as they happen. a shared central space for such information would make it much easier for editors to be able to have a central resource to review recent events and to see if they warrant inclusion in various higher-level articles, such as history articles, science articles, technology, etc. --Sm8900 (talk) 01:32, 27 September 2015 (UTC)
thanks for your reply. but no, that's not what I meant.rather, I meant exhaustive and inclusive articles which would chronicle and record every occurrence in a particular topic or area.so, for instance, the US CONgress currently addresses a huge number of items which never get reflected here. a Chronicle article on American politics could reflect many items addressed by Congress without, for example, bloating the regular encyclopedic articles on Congress. --Sm8900 (talk) 20:50, 27 September 2015 (UTC)
hi Jim.henderson. no, not for that reason, but rather because an exhaustive compendium of everything which happens in Congress, the UN, or the Chicago City Council is not necessarily warranted for a regular Wikipedia article. however, it would be a good informational resource which should still be available somewhere at this site.
additionally, it might not just be a chronicle of official proceedings, but could also be a comprehensive record of all historical events and current events of interest. it could include links to existing articles in order to do so.
So a chronicle which collates links to every article here on US current events, or alternately a chronicle which records every political news item in the State of Colorado, or in all major US cities during the year 2015, might not be warranted for a regular article. but it still might be useful in the long term as an informational archive and resource. ---- Sm8900 (talk) 00:11, 30 September 2015 (UTC)
My gut reaction to this proposal is: no. would allow us to create a common space and resource where historical events could be noted and referenced, without requiring us to change the regular historical articles to record new events before their eventual significance is fully understood That's original research and we can't decide what to include/not include without a thesis for the page. If we have a thesis which explains what qualifies to be included/excluded, then it should be a standard History of X article. We shouldn't be in the busniess of create a central narrative of events as they occur, we have to go based on what Reliable sources report (either as new coverage or as historians writing and drawing the inferences). Reporting on recent events is either the perview of WikiNews or the perview of a article that is written to support a In the News point on the frontpage. Anything else pushes the Recent-isim factor of day in the sun coverage. Hasteur (talk) 18:12, 30 September 2015 (UTC)
My gut reaction is likewise no. There are some instances where "long list of everything" articles are warranted—List of Statutory Instruments of the United Kingdom, 1994 and the like—but those are adequately covered in the existing list format. "A comprehensive record of all historical events and current events of interest" would be unworkable (are you aware of how many events take place in even a small city in any given year?) since they would either be unworkably large, or require the invention of arbitrary inclusion criteria. ‑ iridescent18:17, 30 September 2015 (UTC)
hm, okay.
well, firstly, i only meant to include only those events and items for which reliable sources do exist. in other words, each event would need to have been reported in some other reliable source or citations, just like regular articles. so I agree, no original research should be involved at all for these.
as far as your other point, I hear ya. however, the problem is that currently, there is no central article to note current events of notability, no matter how notable they are, unless they are already accepted as being of genuine historical significance. and even then, there is no central place to chronicle them. so an item of medium but genuine significance might never get recorded anywhere here.
we could still retain the same standards of notability as would currently govern any encyclopedia article. the difference would be that this would consciously be a place, if you like, for timeline articles on current events of some genuine significance,but which otherwise might not get their own entries until a year or two after they occurred.
so I am willing to modify this idea almost infinitely to retain adherence to our basic notability rules, yet still to provide a different type of article which would provide some degree of a new approach.
I recognize that this may still not allay all your concerns or reservations on this, but does that at least improve the idea somewhat? thanks for all your input here. --Sm8900 (talk) 18:24, 30 September 2015 (UTC)
sub-section re Chronicle namespace idea
Perhaps you could write a "sample" in userspace of what you think a Chronicle would look like? It doesn't have to be long, or even based on real events, but it might help to make clearer exactly what you are proposing. QuiteUnusual (talk) 11:17, 1 October 2015 (UTC)
hm, that's a good idea. thanks for your helpful idea on that. I will start working on that. anyone, feel free to keep adding comments if you want. thanks! --Sm8900 (talk) 13:15, 1 October 2015 (UTC)
Would creating WP:Wikiproject News address some of these issues? The idea that the wikiproject's goal is to incorporate news stories into appropriate articles. Might help ensure that relevant stories don't get missed. Oiyarbepsy (talk) 04:58, 9 October 2015 (UTC)
thanks for your ideas on that! that is an interesting idea. I will consider that.
by the way, I do want to create a sample article for this as one editor suggested aboive. it may take me a little while to get that prepared. If necessary, I will repost this idea in the near future if this discussion gets archived, once I have that item to provide to folks here.
Maybe existing articles could be marked up in some way to identify the date(s) on which they took place, and added to special "chronicle" categories that would list said articles in chronological order (with dates shown) instead of alphabetical. That would give you the benefits of your new namespace (about which I'm not at all convinced) without as much work being involved in maintaining it. Chuntuk (talk) 15:17, 21 October 2015 (UTC)
Titles named after ethnic groups of the United States
Latest comment: 9 years ago11 comments3 people in discussion
From the top of WP:VPP: The policy section of the village pump is used to discuss proposed policies and guidelines and changes to existing policies and guidelines. If your discussion fits that description, that would be the highest visibility. If not, you probably won't do any better than VPR for visibility. ―Mandruss☎05:44, 12 October 2015 (UTC)
Only if you have a specific and concise proposition. I don't recommend RfCs for general discussion of a topic. ―Mandruss☎05:48, 12 October 2015 (UTC)
I've done general discussion with RFC often. How can I attract people without RFC tags? Contact everybody one by one or talk page by talk page? --George Ho (talk) 05:51, 12 October 2015 (UTC)
You could post at various other public venues ... related projects, other Village Pump pages, article talk pages, and so on. I don't know of any limit to that kind of advertising of a discussion. But don't run afoul of Wikipedia:Canvassing. ―Mandruss☎05:56, 12 October 2015 (UTC)
No clue, I know nothing about your issues. But as stated above it has to be somehow in the context of policy and/or guideline at VPP. ―Mandruss☎06:03, 12 October 2015 (UTC)
You're approaching the limit of my knowledge and experience. VPP also says: If you have a question about how to apply an existing policy or guideline, try one of the many Wikipedia:Noticeboards. So you need to go to VPP or a noticeboard, depending on whether a potentially applicable guideline already exists, and neither of us knows the answer to that question. I think I'd just go to VPP, explain the situation, and ask for advice on how to proceed with this. I don't think they'll bite you (very hard) for asking a question. One thing is for sure, this page doesn't get a lot of attention. ―Mandruss☎06:43, 12 October 2015 (UTC)
I don‘t see the contradiction: the topics covered by WP:NCET are mentioned in the list of exceptions at WP:PLURAL, “Articles on people groups.“ So AFAICT both guidelines agree that these titles should be plural.—Odysseus147920:40, 12 October 2015 (UTC)
ITN system on deaths
Latest comment: 9 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
I requested "Geoffrey Howe" to be removed from ITN in Candidates page and the user talk page. There wasn't a consensus to post his name into ITN. However, I'm still awaiting responses. I can't hold my patience any longer. What shall I do? --George Ho (talk) 10:41, 12 October 2015 (UTC)
From the top of this page: The idea lab section of the village pump is a place where new ideas or suggestions on general Wikipedia issues can be incubated, for later submission for consensus discussion at Village pump (proposals). This doesn't fit that description at all. I'm not being anal, but you'll generally get better results when you read the instructions and use things for their intended purpose. I'd suggest WP:HD or WP:VPM. If you don't know the best place to go with something, WP:HD will usually provide pretty good advice; their sole mission is to help editors and readers. ―Mandruss☎19:38, 12 October 2015 (UTC)
Grants:IEG/Wikipedia likes Galactic Exploration for Posterity 2015
Latest comment: 9 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
Dear Fellow Wikipedians,
I JethroBT (WMF) suggested that I consult with the village pump to get feedback and help to improve my idea about "As an unparalleled way to raise awareness of the Wikimedia projects, I propose to create a tremendous media opportunity presented by launching Wikipedia via space travel."
It seems to me that most of the people who would hear about this action are the people who already know about Wikipedia, and therefore don't exactly need their awareness of its existence to be raised. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:29, 15 October 2015 (UTC)
Latest comment: 9 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Referring back to the thread at Wikipedia:Village pump (idea lab)/Archive_18#Article for deletion patrolling, I think there should not only be a page for patrolling proposed deletion but should also be one for patrolling articles nominated for deletion because so many deletion debates including a lot of the ones in Wikipedia:WikiProject Deletion sorting/Albums and songs are getting so little attention and not all of those articles will get prodded before getting nominated for deletion. Since nobody has yet done the hard task of creating a page for patrolling proposed deletion, it's not going to be much more effort for those people who create one to at the same time also create a page for patrolling nomination for deletion. In addition to that, even fewer deletion debates will get so little attention if relisted discussions go onto a separate deletion sorting WikiProject. For example, if debates in Wikipedia:WikiProject Deletion sorting/Albums and songs move to Wikipedia:WikiProject Deletion sorting/Albums and songs (relisting) when they get relisted so that experienced editors will be able to choose to only participate in relisted debates and the other debates won't devote so much attention away from the relisted debates. In addition to that, I think there should also be a third patrolling page for patrolling the relisting of debates so that they'll get even more attention from experienced editors who choose to patrol it. Blackbombchu (talk) 18:03, 14 October 2015 (UTC)
English Wikipedia about to reach 5,000,000 (5 million) articles. Take advantage of upcoming news coverage
Latest comment: 9 years ago3 comments3 people in discussion
Useful wikicode that you can put on your user page to advertise how many pages we have:
<div>As of {{CURRENTDAYNAME}}, {{CURRENTDAY2}} {{CURRENTMONTHNAME}} {{CURRENTYEAR}}, {{CURRENTTIME}} (UTC), the English Wikipedia has {{NUMBEROF|USERS|en|N}} registered users, {{NUMBEROF|ACTIVEUSERS|en|N}} active editors, and {{NUMBEROF|ADMINS|en|N}} administrators. Together we have made {{NUMBEROF|EDITS|en|N}} edits, created {{NUMBEROF|PAGES|en|N}} pages of all kinds and created {{NUMBEROF|ARTICLES|en|N}} articles.
The above wikicode gives you this result:
As of Monday, 30 December 2024, 01:57 (UTC), the English Wikipedia has 48,476,930 registered users, 116,969 active editors, and 848 administrators. Together we have made 1,261,337,700 edits, created 62,159,034 pages of all kinds and created 6,932,067 articles.
Latest comment: 9 years ago3 comments3 people in discussion
We do not permit discussion, suggestions, and criticism of an article within the article page itself. That is what the talk page is for, and such comments are routinely reverted. However, banner maintenance templates do much the same thing and the consensus is to use them. Is there some policy distinction I am missing here? If not, should there be something in policy? Personally, I think that most banner templates belong on the talk page, not the article, but that wasn't really my point. My point is that we are being somewhat contradictory and unclear. SpinningSpark15:49, 20 October 2015 (UTC)
I largely agree, with the exception of some templates that warn readers who may otherwise reach too far fetching conclusions. E.g. warnings about lack of citing make sense on the article space as that warns non-editor readers about the potentially low reliability of the information. However many of the templates (e.g. lead too long etc.) are not helping readers and should be relegated to talk. Arnoutf (talk) 17:35, 21 October 2015 (UTC)
Those banners on article pages exist largely to encourage readers to become editors and to fix the page. So commentary in the form of these specific templates are permitted and encourages on pages. Just no freeform discussions. Oiyarbepsy (talk) 04:22, 25 October 2015 (UTC)
When lacking prerequisite knowledge.
Latest comment: 9 years ago6 comments3 people in discussion
"A deep understanding of sheaf theory is not necessary for what we do here and it would be enough to acquire a basic familiarity with the definitions since we only want the convenience of the language." - Jeffry M. Lee, Manifolds and Differential Geometry.
Hi! I have an idea about how to help people who want to read about something they lack the prerequisite knowledge for. It could be used for improving the functionality of any digitalized text, but my idea is only concrete when it comes to texts containing definitions.
Basically, when reading a definition on some wiki there may be terms and concepts that one has not seen before. To understand the definition, one then has to go to the articles of these terms and concepts. The same can happen when reading those definitions. It all becomes quite hard and disheartening since one doesn't know how much is left to read and remember before one can understand the original definition. I often find myself in this situation and do something manually that could perhaps be done automatically on a wiki. Here is an example:
Say we have the following definition:
"A is B with C."
Now, let's say we don't know what B is. So we go to the definition of B:
"B is D with E."
For simplicity, let's say we do know what D and E are. We would have liked the possibility to expand the original definition into:
"A is D with E with C. D with E is known as B."
Or the following sequence of definitions:
"B is D with E."
"A is B with C."
There should be a link next to "Definition" in the article of A. When clicking this link, one should be able to generate the smallest necessary sequence of definitions. Here is an example using an actual article on Wikipedia (module (mathematics)):
Let's say we want (need) to know what module is in mathematics. The formal definition of module, in its article here on Wikipedia, contains "ring" and "abelian group". These have their own articles with their own definitions. Imagine we already had that link next to "Formal definition". When I click it, I would want to see:
module
ring
abelian group
Then I click on ring, because I do not know what that is. I would get:
ring
set
binary operation
abelian group
associative
commutative
additive identity
additive inverse
monoid
multiplicative identity
distributive
module
ring
abelian group
Actually, the definition of ring here on Wikipedia contains a lot of terms with their own articles. Many are used in the definition and explained at the same time, which makes things a bit more complicated. Not all are actually needed. The ones that are explained in the definition of ring should simply be excluded from the list or marked in some way. I have written them in italic. I did this with "abelian group" under module as well, since it is explained in the definition of ring.
If I know what "set" and "binary operation" is, then I have all I need. I would now click "generate" or something similar, and the following would be generated:
[the wiki's definition of ring]
[the wiki's definition of module]
This would be the smallest amount of text necessary for me to understand what module is.
One thing that I have to add is that the text under "Definition" is often more than just the definition, meaning that there would be an unnecessarily large amount of text. This is not the case for the definition of ring, but in the case of the definition of module, half of the text under "Definition" should be under some subtitle like "About the definition".
In the examples I have used, very few definitions were needed and it might seem like this is all very unnecessary. Wikipedia is already relatively convenient. I do think it would be a major improvement, but one would benefit even more from it in the case of e.g. digitalized books. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 130.239.119.136 (talk) 08:15, 21 October 2015 (UTC) 130.239.119.136 (talk) 08:18, 21 October 2015 (UTC)
To be honest, I don't really get how this could ever be implemented. We already have disambiguation pages for things like ring that does part of this trick (and is light on maintenance). Also from your definition list of ring I am missing the most obvious one Ring (jewellery). How could your proposal decide that that specific definition is irrelevant in the context while still remaining to be maintainable by unexperienced editors? Arnoutf (talk) 17:15, 21 October 2015 (UTC)
I mean, you just take the links that are in the article of module (mathematics) under Formal Definition, and put them in these lists. Whatever version of ring is in the definition, it's the right one. If ring (jewellery) is not the right one then it wont even be there in the first place. It would just be like picking out the links from the text, or removing the text between the links. I mean you don't need to know what the links actually lead to. If you're wondering how the reader will know that's it not jewellery then all I can say is that it isn't for people lacking that much prerequisite knowledge. I'm sorry. I actually didn't think about that. Also, I don't know how to actually implement it. I just had an idea. I was pretty sure I posted it as an idea and not a proposal. But then again I don't even know if this is how you reply...130.239.119.136 (talk) 11:14, 23 October 2015 (UTC)
If you're talking about how some entries in the lists were in italics, then ye I get how that would be much harder to implement and actually require work from the ones editing the contents of the articles. So skip that part. I think it would be useful anyway. Just picking out the links under definition and ordering the in a list. If an entry in the list is pressed the same is done for the definition of the corresponding article, and the list is added above the first one. The original definition and those that one has clicked on will be the ones to be shown in the end.130.239.119.136 (talk) 12:08, 23 October 2015 (UTC)
You can do something like this using grouped references, see WP:REFGROUP. That's pretty mcuh what is done in Analogue filter with the "note" group. You don't have to call it note, you could just as easily call it def and have a definitions section at the bottom of the article. The definition will be shown on mouseover, the reader does not even have to click through to the bottom of the article. SpinningSpark17:34, 21 October 2015 (UTC)
Thank you! That mouseover would solve the examples I brought up, but what if the lack of knowledge goes deeper? When I do this irl I usuall have to go like 4 definitions deep. I mean, to understand a definition I would have to read another definition (this is where the examples stop, just 1 definition deep), and to understand that definition I would have to read another definition, and to understand that definition I would have to read another definition, and one more time.130.239.119.136 (talk) 11:14, 23 October 2015 (UTC)
Discussing the article title without proposing a new title
Latest comment: 9 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
I discussed "Cold War II" and wanting to start a newer, fresher RfC discussion at Talk:Cold War II#The current title. Users said that past discussions would make another discussion redundant. I still want to use RfC and ask others to come up with alternative names. --George Ho (talk) 02:10, 23 October 2015 (UTC)
Vote system on accuracy of articles
Latest comment: 9 years ago6 comments6 people in discussion
Although Wikipedia is now a world reference and quality of articles increases on a constant basis, you can still find people that dismisses it, claiming that, since everybody can modify articles, it can be full of mistakes, and lies. The usual counter-argument from Wikipedia is that it is actually true, but that's also true for books (and all human intellectual work piece) but Wikipedia has a sheer advantage that mistakes can quickly be edited. But the anti-Wikipedia impression seems to stick in part of the population.
Has a vote system ever been considered? I mean something based on clarity and accuracy of the articles (rather than just liking the article or not). This system was inspired to me by the StackExchange that succeeds to obtain high-quality answers from its community (see how much energy the people in scifi.stackexchange.com put in their answers to "futile" topics like comics). To avoid wars on articles, downvotes could be allowed only under some conditions (as in the SE network). This system would not be a substitute for the "talk" page, but a metric to see how satisfactory the article is. It could also have a purpose for improvement of articles: low quality articles would appear immediately, rather than the usual system where (I am exaggerating) we are just waiting for an expert to come accross the article, notice it sucks, and then dedicate some time to fix it. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 220.87.111.170 (talk) 02:16, 24 October 2015 (UTC)
Hi, IP user. I don't know whether such a system has ever been considered, but I have to say that I would be in favor of something like you are suggesting being put in place. Wikihow has a button on the bottom of each article that says something like, "Did this help you?" and I can see it possibly being a lot of use to Wikipedia as well. It might also help solve disputes between editors on details like infoboxes (probably not, though). White Arabian mare (Neigh) 20:43, 24 October 2015 (UTC)White Arabian mare
Hello, our work is to improve articles. If someone thinks that an article isn't good, that person should tell us why. That is, we must encourage people to tell us how to improve articles. A thumbs up or down doesn't help us. --NaBUru38 (talk) 21:12, 24 October 2015 (UTC)
Didn't we used to have something like that? Or at least, a quick comment system? I can't remember what it was called, but it was completely useless and got dropped. SpinningSpark22:23, 24 October 2015 (UTC)
We used to have the WP:Article feedback tool, which was somewhat like you described. The idea was generally a good one, but the volunteer editors here were completely unable to keep up with all the comments and unable to respond appropriately. As a result, the tool was turned off. Oiyarbepsy (talk) 04:17, 25 October 2015 (UTC)
Yes most of the response was not useful. And the harmful responses required cleanup. A very small proportion of feedeback resulted in improvements to articles. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 07:26, 25 October 2015 (UTC)
Wikipedia training course
Latest comment: 9 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
I think Wikipedia should have a WikiProject that can teaches Wikipedia users how to become good Wikipedians in pretty much the same way as teachers teach their students how to get marks in courses. It can be only for those registered users who choose to take that course. Blackbombchu (talk) 00:58, 25 October 2015 (UTC)
Latest comment: 9 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
I think an option should be provided to change the font style and background color of articles as the current font style is too dull and uninteresting.
Moreover it makes reading long articles irritating as well as boring.
Wikipedia should give an option for changing the font. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 59.97.212.44 (talk) 14:13, 27 October 2015 (UTC)
You can get the ability to do that if you register an account. Your preferences will then allow you to change the skin (the appearance) to a number of presets. These can be further refined with the use of CSS which will allow you to change the fonts and many other aspects of the appearance. Once you know specifically what you want to change (which elements have which font etc), you can ask at Wikipedia:Village pump (technical) for advice on the CSS code needed to achieve it. SpinningSpark16:55, 27 October 2015 (UTC)
Latest comment: 9 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
The notion of Wikipedia:Today's articles for improvement returning to the main page as a permanent feature has recently come up, amidst a flood of activity to our talk page. Please weigh in on this important discussion, and help us to refine our concept before we officially put a proposal together.--Coin945 (talk) 18:57, 27 October 2015 (UTC)
Watchlist and your opinion
Latest comment: 9 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest comment: 9 years ago7 comments4 people in discussion
I think it might be possible to have a WikiProject where the people in it interact with each other in a complex way to improve Wikipedia very efficiently. It might be very hard and require a lot of research resources to figure out how to create such a WikiProject, but it's probably not totally impossible. One possible way to do it might be that when the Wikiproject first starts, the people in the Wikiproject will make it a top priority to maintain the method of interaction going on in it that will keep being determined by the consensus within that WikiProject of what that Wikiproject's guidelines and policies are going to be. That WikiProject if it works well enough, when ever somebody asks a question about why a certain policy of that Wikiproject is the way it is, will always get a clear answer that they understand of why. That Wikiproject could take new people who want to join and train them as long as it doesn't take new people so fast that it can't keep up with using which ever method of interaction is determined by consensus. Once it grows sufficiently big, people who ask question within that WikiProject could be given an answer that's a complex statement when it would take a hopelessly large number of simple statements to answer their question. A complex statement is a statement that's way shorter to describe than the number of research topics it's defined in terms of. Some people might even be able to figure out new useful ideas from the complex statements they learned. Once that Wikiproject grows very big, it might even be able to do have some experts to C program running to notice patterns in Wikipedia and even C program editing for improving a large number of articles all at once in a complex way. Maybe in the really distant future, some people using that WikiProject will getting IBM Watson to make a lot of computations to futher speed up the ability of people using the WikiProject to get the research results that are useful to the research they're doing in that WikiProject. Blackbombchu (talk) 22:38, 21 October 2015 (UTC)
Apologies, but having read the above twice I can't see what you're actually proposing. "A WikiProject where the people in it interact with each other in a complex way to improve Wikipedia very efficiently" is the intent (if not always the actual practice) behind every WikiProject (and theoretically, every talkpage). Are you suggesting that Wikipedia recruit and train an elite administrative class of highly-educated super-users to make the final judgement call on decisions, with the ultimate aim of having the existing admin corps replaced by a wholly automated expert system? If so, the former goes against virtually every principle of Wikipedia, and the latter would be pushing the boundaries of the capabilities of a major intelligence agency, let alone the dozen or so people in San Francisco who constitute WMF Engineering. ‑ iridescent22:51, 21 October 2015 (UTC)
No, what I was proposing was that that the people using WikiProject interact with each other in a super complex way and try to interact in as optimal a way as they can, and as that WikiProject grows to include more people, the people using it will do their own figuring out of how to make that WikiProject better. Blackbombchu (talk) 23:38, 21 October 2015 (UTC)
If you are using super complex in some technical way, then you need to explain what that is, if you are not, then we already have it. We already have people trying to interact in an optimal way (except for the ones that don't - they're called vandals and disruptive elements). Wikiprojects already do their own figuring out. There does not seem to be an actionable suggestion in there. SpinningSpark05:50, 22 October 2015 (UTC)
@Spinningspark: I have a better idea. That WikiProject should be for people to interact with each other in a complex way to efficiently edit Wikipedia. Maybe that Wikiproject could have a head group that makes rules about how the people in it will interact with each other to maintain the efficient method of interaction. The rules could guide those people into efficiently discussing with each other to form a consensus what edits should be made, researching which C programs to run on Wikipedia, and researching improvements to rules to give to the head group such as a more efficient researching technique. This idea need not be complete in order for the WikiProject to get started. My idea is that it will get started using my simplified idea and as the people using the WikiProject, the research conducted in it will keep self improving its idea of how it should work causing the head group to make improvements to the way it works. Blackbombchu (talk) 16:43, 27 October 2015 (UTC)
As already explained to you - repeatedly - you are describing how Wikipedia already operates. Can you explain what you're proposing that would differ from what we currently do, why you feel it would be an improvement, and why it would take a separate project to achieve it? (FWIW, you've completely lost me with "researching which C programs to run on Wikipedia". Are you talking about streamlining WP:Database reports, or are you proposing embedding code within individual articles?) ‑ iridescent22:13, 27 October 2015 (UTC)
In re"that Wikiproject's guidelines and policies": WikiProjects don't have any guidelines or policies. They have WP:Advice pages, which are just as important and valuable (or not) as any {{essay}} that I write on my own. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:30, 2 November 2015 (UTC)
Creating a backlog drive
Latest comment: 9 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
It would require a change in the MediaWiki software. We cannot do it here at the English Wikipedia. The edit window doesn't use DISPLAYTITLE at first but a preview does. DISPLAYTITLE can make many other changes to color, size, font, character location and so on. Some of them would be bad in log entries. Logs are mainly for editors anyway and not readers so I don't think the issue is important. PrimeHunter (talk) 18:34, 4 November 2015 (UTC)
Would it really require a change in the MediaWiki software? Wouldn't it just be a matter of setting $wgCapitalLinks to False for this wiki? Maybe undesirable for various reasons, but not a software change? Stanning (talk) 20:53, 4 November 2015 (UTC)
Latest comment: 9 years ago11 comments7 people in discussion
I am working on developing a plan for a Documentation: namespace to hold all the pages currently located at Template:Foo/doc, etc etc, and I am developing it at User:Thisismyrofl/Templates proposal. I hope that people might take a look, point out any criticisms, and edge cases to be had with my plan.
Why do I feel we need a Documentation: namespace? There are two fundamental components of a Wikipedia article:
content page, and a
talk page for discussion.
This pattern applies to most namespaces. But for a Wikipedia template, there are instead three (sometimes five) fundamental components:
template code, which is the actual wikitext and parameters, etc, to be transcluded into any number of articles
template documentation, which describes the template, why it's needed, how to use it
Somewhere in the development of this encyclopedia, these three unique components have been squished into space for two components: the code-and-documentation, and the talk page. The template documentation is not given much of any actual accommodation in the Mediawiki software, instead being treated as just another template (a template that in reality will be transcluded into exactly one page). To accommodate this double function of the Template: namespace, we use lots and lots of nasty include rules: noinclude, onlyinclude, includeonly. This category applies to the host page, this category to the template itself. Virtually every major template has documentation, but still we don't think it's ubiquitous enough for an implementation more universal than pasting {{Documentation}} and include rules on every template page.
Relevant links in my fight for this, in some chronological order:
Just to note, Modules also need documentation pages. If the namespace will be Documentation, then there is a potential conflict if a template and module have the same name. Oiyarbepsy (talk) 23:18, 8 November 2015 (UTC)
If you look at the plan, we would store module documentation at Documentation:Module:Foo and template documentation at Documentation:Template:Foo. So no conflict - nor is there conflict for any other namespace. − Thisismyrofl (talk) 23:35, 8 November 2015 (UTC)
Too many things going on at the moment to give this the attention it deserves, but I'll just note as someone with modest template involvement, your problem identification strikes a chord. I haven't reviewed your proposal well enough to know whether it solves a problem, and I'm not sure I have the IT expertise to fully evaluate it, but I'm supportive of looking into it to see if it would be helpful.--S Philbrick(Talk)14:25, 9 November 2015 (UTC)
@Thisismyrofl: As @Whatamidoing (WMF): says, this is a great idea, and work we've been thinking about for a few years. Doing it properly and scalably is blocked on being able to make the content<->discussion pairing you identified more flexible, which is phab:T487. Unfortunately that's been stuck in the early proposal stage for a while. I'll see if we can get that moved forward. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 19:45, 9 November 2015 (UTC)
I see the issue. It might be best to wait for that to go through before moving forward with much of my proposal. I certainly don't know enough about the technicalities of MediaWiki to suggest much in the way of action in that direction.
I like the idea behind this proposal, but the double-namespace scheme (Documentation:Template:Foo) seems weird, as multiple colons in a page name usually signifies an interwiki link. Why not take a cue from how talk pages are done and introduce Template_Documentation: and Module_Documentation: namespaces instead? Either that or move talk pages to Talk:Foo, Talk:User:Foo, Talk:Wikipedia:Foo, etc. (but I doubt that that proposal would gain any traction). --Ahecht (TALK PAGE) 20:24, 9 November 2015 (UTC)
The double-namespace scheme was informed by the current namespace numbering scheme (where odd numbers are the Talk namespaces for the even non-Talks) and by the recognition that while documentation is expected in Template: and Module, documentation does occur in some instances in almost all other namespaces, especially User: and Wikipedia. My initial proposal, which was shot down by the community, was for a Template documentation: namespace. I would suggest to store all documentation in a Documentation: namespace with some sort of aliasing mechanism (from Template documentation:Foo to Documentation:Template:Foo, for example)... but the RFC linked by Jdforrester raises an even better idea. − Thisismyrofl (talk) 23:31, 9 November 2015 (UTC)
I recognize that Help: and Documentation: would seem redundant, but I think it would be preferable to avoid mixing pages with such broad scope as Help:Editing with pages such limited scope as documentation page for Template:Infobox bird. There's a clear difference. − Thisismyrofl (talk) 23:31, 9 November 2015 (UTC)
Grant some people from some research groups permission to insert original research into Wikipedia articles
Latest comment: 9 years ago9 comments9 people in discussion
Original research might be necessary to make some explanations in Wikipedia articles clearer. I'm sure some of those people will have the skill to only insert pieces of original research that are true, which was probably the original reason for the rule no original research. They would probably be verifiable by the ability of other experts to figure them out. Maybe there could be a way for people to demonstrate in Wikipedia that they have the skill not to insert any wrong or unverifiable original research. Blackbombchu (talk) 00:53, 25 October 2015 (UTC)
I agree that original research would be a very bad thing here, but there is a point to be made. Subject matter experts are often made to grub around finding sources for well known facts found in numerous student-level textbooks. This is unnecessarily hard work and tends to drive such people away. I have long held that we need to cure ourselves of the "little blue number disease" (the one that requires a blue number at the end of each sentence) and take a more robust approach. No other establishment in the known universe has such stupidly onerous requirements on sourcing. At the end of the day, the blue numbers guarantee nothing, one has to actually read the sources for a guarantee. SpinningSpark18:45, 25 October 2015 (UTC)
Or any high quality scientific paper I would like to add. In scientific papers you can bring in new facts for 3 reasons. (1) By rigorous sourcing not unlike Wikipedia (2) By original data (3) By logical argument (synthesis). Options 2 is only relevant for primary sourced ideas, option 3 is only relevant to primary and secondary sources - neither are for tertiary sources like Wikipedia. Arnoutf (talk) 18:47, 2 November 2015 (UTC)
This is a dreadful idea if you want to keep Wikipedia as a neutral encyclopedia. For such a system to work all academics would have to agree about everything all the time. Endgame for this sort of situation would be low ranking academics with lots of free time pushing their POVs in article with no restraint. Brustopher (talk) 21:59, 25 October 2015 (UTC)
Is there any interest in holding other "Region months"?
Latest comment: 9 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Asia Month looks to have been successful. While some of the editors creating new articles under the Asia Month banner would have created those articles anyways because that's where they worked, it does seem like other editors (myself included) jumped in to create new content in an area that they normally would not have.
I'd love to see a few more 'region months' to help combat the natural biases that I suspect Wikipedia has as an English language project (i.e. that we cover English-speaking areas much better because people write about the areas in which they live and because the sources are in English).
Would there be any interest in an Africa month, a Caribbean month, a South America month (or Latin America month), a Small islands month (for all of the tiny island nations), etc?
Latest comment: 9 years ago9 comments6 people in discussion
Sometimes, I think people may want to see a Wikipedia article without the redlinks in it. (so "text including Something wierd here" would instead simply show up as "text including Something wierd here"). Would this make sense as a preferences item? (If not, is it possible by setting a js/css file?)Naraht (talk) 17:14, 11 November 2015 (UTC)
Redlinks serve a function. Especially on a new topic (increasingly rare on Wikipedia) a redlink serves to indicate the demand for an article providing in depth information. If such an article would be trivial and would never materialize, the option, of course, would be to remove the Wikilink. But since we can already do that, there is no need to change. Arnoutf (talk) 18:07, 11 November 2015 (UTC)
.mw-bodya.new{color:#210!important;}/* Very dark red links */ To removed them you need JavaScript like $($('a.new').replaceWith($('target').html()));/*slower*/. Frankly, its a fucking stupid idea and show how out of touch WMF's mobile team is. I've had to implement a redlink search functionality into WP:Dab solver because of this idiot "make it complete" mentality. You can check out the Video Game reference library (Wikipedia:Meetup/NYC/Women in Architecture#To-Do and on user pages) to find articles that have references, but no article. — Dispenser23:32, 11 November 2015 (UTC) Updated 20:02, 20 November 2015 (UTC)
@Naraht: My guess is you wanted an option that would be permanent, but if a reader wants this option on an individual article, clicking on the "printable version" in the left sidebar will render the article without red links.--S Philbrick(Talk)15:02, 16 November 2015 (UTC)
@Sphilbrick: That is something that I hadn't thought of, but that will get rid of all links, red and blue, I was hoping for something that would show the blue, but not the red. Cheers!Naraht (talk) 15:07, 16 November 2015 (UTC)
Fair enough, but I occasionally run across someone who finds all the colored links distracting, so that is an option to remember if that comes up.--S Philbrick(Talk)15:37, 16 November 2015 (UTC)
A new type of pending changes protection as an alternative to full protection?
Latest comment: 9 years ago4 comments3 people in discussion
Idea: to set up a type of pending changes that allow autoconfirmed editors to edit an article, but changes must be approved by an administrator. Similar to how articles with pending changes protection allow IP/non-autoconfirmed editors to edit articles, but changes must be approved by pending changes reviewers. This would allow constructive edits to disputed articles (such as typo fixes and other uncontroversial edits) without the need to respond to edit requests. This type of protection may be suitable for articles like Nanak Shah Fakir, Brianna Wu, Mass killings under Communist regimes, Douchebag, List of social networking websites, and other long-term fully-protected articles. What do you think? sst✈discuss08:59, 13 November 2015 (UTC)
PC2 allows pending changes reviewers to approve submissions. I am suggesting a level of pending changes where only administrators can approve changes. sst✈(discuss)17:20, 20 November 2015 (UTC)
Thanks for the phab link. A couple comments. 1) There are probably two separable changes, one to pull from wikidata, the other to pull from the associated article (so that fr:Discussion:Johns_Hopkins_University_Press pulls from both the wikidata for fr:Johns_Hopkins_University_Press and the actual text for fr:Johns_Hopkins_University_Press to look for interwikilinks that haven't been moved to wikidata. If the Wikidata one is easier, that would be fine. 2) In terms of pages that don't exist, what does the code do if one of the articles in a single wikidata entry gets deleted, does it still show the language? If so, then I think include the language regardless, worst that happens is that the user ends up being asked to create a talk page. (I should probably put these comments in the phab entry as well.)Naraht (talk) 16:45, 19 November 2015 (UTC)
Would suppressing edit count reporting beyond some level help reduce editcountits
Latest comment: 9 years ago12 comments7 people in discussion
This page in a nutshell: Wikipedia should stop reporting edit counts beyond some level (to be determined by the community) to discourage editcountis
The background for one specific incident can be seen here:
The discussions are still unfolding even as I write this but, in brief, an editor created approximately 80,000 redirects, most of which are viewed to be as inappropriate. Dealing with this issue has already occupied dozens of hours of editor attention, and is likely to involve many more hours of cleanup and discussion about how to handle this specific event.
It is my view that one of the causes of this problem may be characterized as metastasized editcountis.
If this were the only such case, I'd simply be happy allowing the community processes to carry on and decide how to handle the specific individual. However, I think this may be the symptom of a general problem as opposed to a one-off situation.
In many cases, the editors high on that list are some of the most respected content creators in Wikipedia. Many of these editors have received kudos, well deserved, for the substantial contribution to this project.
However, I have sometimes wondered how editors managed to amass such large numbers of edits. My casual investigation leads me to some disquieting results. It isn't always the case that the edits fall into what we think of as a canonical edit — find some article that needs improvement, do some research, add or modify some text, add a reference, rinse and repeat.
I'm reminded of the adage "to err is human, to really screw up requires a computer". In some cases the accounts are the result of automated or semi automated editing. Here it is important to be especially careful. There are a lot of legitimate reasons for doing automated or semiautomated edits. In many cases, each of these edits improves the encyclopedia in a meaningful way. However, there are other such edits whose benefit seems more in generating edit counts than in actually improving the encyclopedia. I understand we have rules to prohibit automated edits that are truly minor, but I think we've all seen examples of edits whose contribution is quite limited.
I don't want to focus solely on automated edits, especially as the current situation appears not to have involved automated editing. However, it seems clear that this editor identified some article, then dreamed up 20 to 50 alternative phrases that might have something to do with the article and created them as redirects. There's a bit of consternation about the nature of the edits focusing on their appropriateness. That's a valid concern, but my focus here is not so much on whether the choice of wording was inappropriate, but the possibility that our emphasis on edit counts encouraged someone to mindlessly create useless redirects.
As another example, I spend a fair amount of time at CSD deleting unused categories. In many cases, it appears that the category wasn't really created in good faith, but was a mindless creation intended to bolster edit counts. Do we really need a category to keep track of corporations that were dissolved in Syria in the year 1132?
One solution is simple — let's discourage the counting of edits beyond some level. I think it is useful at times to know whether an editor has a few hundred edits or a few thousand or tens of thousands. If you need to discuss something with them on a talk page, it's helpful to know whether you are dealing with a newbie or an experienced editor. For that reason, I'm not proposing the absurd notion that we should suppress the reporting of edit counts. However, I think that beyond some point, the count provides no useful information about the type of editor, and merely becomes in some cases, an ego measure. I'll reiterate that this is not a blanket view of all of the editors at the top of the list. In fact, I hope it applies to only a minority. It is clear that many brand-new editors are obsessed with edit counts, and we often counsel them not to be quite so concerned. In many cases, after a few thousand edits, they lose their obsession, and I am confident that many people near the top of the list don't really care whether they have a hundred thousand or 300,000 edits.
My suggestion is simple — why not suppress the public listing of edit counts beyond some level? If we did so, then if an editor reached that level, they should continue to edit for the improvement of the encyclopedia but would no longer be encouraged to find creative ways to generate high edit counts. They'll make lots of redirects if the redirects are valid, they will make lots of categories if the categories are valid, they'll run AWB if it improves the encyclopedia, but they won't dream up ways to pad the edit account.
I'm sure they'll be lots of opposition and lots of questions. One obvious question is where to set the level. My initial thoughts were something like 50,000 or 100,000. I notice that our service awards go up to 132,000 edits, So that might be a natural choice for an upper limit, although I would prefer something a little bit lower.
If we stopped keeping track of edits beyond some large limit, do we think that editors with more edits would stop editing because they wouldn't get recognition? My hope is that this isn't the case.
It would obviously be some technical details, as edit counts are available and pop-ups and calculated with various edit counters, but I'm certain all those technical details could be worked out if the community thinks that suppressing edit counts beyond some level might help discourage editcountitis.--S Philbrick(Talk)17:14, 6 November 2015 (UTC)
Support. Glad you're bringing this up! I've thought much the same thing, that 50 or 100K edits is something of a threshold we could just describe as "way too many edits." Why display this information, if it encourages individuals to spend an unreasonable amount of their life on a website, or make poor quality edits?
Let's develop some possibilities related to prolific contributors and editcountitis further. Here's a start:
One alternative to editcountitis that might be worth considering is developing tools that tally up manual edits which actually fix a problem in a maintenance backlog, or that provide substantive expansion of content. It's important to come up with incentives that reward editors for making substantive contributions, rather than incentives that encourage participants to waste time pointlessly churning away. --Djembayz (talk) 17:20, 7 November 2015 (UTC)
Opppse – I'm never partial to "solutions" which include hiding information from people. A better solution would be to "redefine" what is considered an appropriate "edit count" – e.g. focusing on just main space edits; or perhaps focusing instead on non-redirect, non-disambig. article creation, or something. --IJBall (contribs • talk) 17:35, 7 November 2015 (UTC)
Oppose. Unfortunately, suppressing edit count is going to make more problems than it solves. People are going to argue about what is an "appropriate" number. You can probably blank the entries in WP:NOE for editors with over 100K edits (just say 100,000+ for these entries) or remove the "Edit count" tool. However, actually hiding the edit count is something beyond the English Wikipedia's control, because it is can be seen in several places, such as in popups and Special:CentralAuth. In principle, this is a good idea, but in reality, suppressing edit count would be very hard. epic genius (talk) 17:42, 7 November 2015 (UTC)
Can I remind participants that this is the idea lab, not Proposals or Policy. The concept behind this page is that editors discuss the idea, and think of ways to improve it, but do not Oppose or even Support. For example @IJBall:, but the rationale included a better solution, specifically, redefining how we count edits. There is precedent for that - when I delete an article, it doesn't count as an edit. What if we decided that creation of redirect or dab pages, while useful, didn't qualify as an edit for the purposes of measuring edit count. That doesn't mean we don't measure them, deletions are counted, but they aren't counted as edits.--S Philbrick(Talk)17:57, 7 November 2015 (UTC)
OK, but I'm still of the opinion that "redefining" what a "good edit count" is is far preferable to "information suppression". So, taking "redirect creation" out of "edit counts" might be a good start. I also think we do need to be leery of automated edits, so that's something else to think about... --IJBall (contribs • talk) 18:03, 7 November 2015 (UTC)
This is exactly the type of discussion I was hoping to have. I started with a simple-minded way of deemphasizing edit counts, and you suggest that the problem should be redefined to think about what constitutes a "good edit count". While that sounds like a challenge, it might have the dual advantage of providing more useful information while at the same time discouraging editcountitis.--S Philbrick(Talk)18:11, 7 November 2015 (UTC)
As another example, @Epicgenius: didn't disagree with the core of the idea, but expressed concern that it would be difficult to agree on the level. I agree. If we ended up concluding that the general idea made sense but we couldn't reach a consensus on the cutoff level, we wouldn't implement it. Similarly if we end up with general support for the concept but there are technical difficulties we won't implement it.--S Philbrick(Talk)18:03, 7 November 2015 (UTC)
The biggest problem I see with edit countitis is at RFA where it is one of the overlyeasy metrics that some people focus on. This is a problem both for well qualified candidates who eschew any use of the tools, and because it distracts people from properly assessing RFA candidates by actually looking at their edits. If we had a list of editors by non minor edits then a lot of my edits, including all the hotcat and twinkle ones, would not be counted. So I would suggest that as well as Wikipedia:List of Wikipedians by number of edits we create Wikipedia:List of Wikipedians by number of non-minor edits, calculted the same way but excluding edits flagged as minor. ϢereSpielChequers19:13, 7 November 2015 (UTC)
By "hide the number itself" I mean that it shows in pop-ups when you hover over someone's name. I wouldn't be in favor of eliminating it, although I guess that's sort of what I said. Are you old enough to remember when McDonald's marquees listed the number of hamburgers they had served? Eventually they opted for a simple "billions served". So one option would be to show the actual number until it reaches some level and then just say for example "100,000+"
On the lists by edit count, I would again show the number up to some level, but after that list all editors greater than the limit, possibly in order of the date they achieved it. I wouldn't be averse to having this information available somewhere because it's conceivable it could be relevant in some context but we don't have to make quite so easy. I have no doubt that some people are looking at Wikipedia editors by edit count and thinking up ways to move themselves up the list. If they do so by adding great content to articles wonderful. If they dream up some category which they can add to 10,000 articles it isn't so clear that it's a gain for the encyclopedia. My concern is I've seen a troubling number of examples of editors in the latter category.--S Philbrick(Talk)18:29, 9 November 2015 (UTC)
A useful approach would be to make the generally displayed edit count more meaningful by including only what we define as substantial edits. This could be accomplished most obviously by omitting various types of edits.
The exclusion rules would be determined by what we want the curated count to indicate. For example, an edit count that highlights significant content editing could be accomplished by excluding Talk page edits, redirects and any other administrative edits, edits to PAG and essay, user, noticeboard and project pages, and article space edits under a certain character count (IOW, including only article edits over a certain character count).
Anti-gaming checks could be created with rules that flag extraordinary counts, like editors performing hundreds of qualified edits per day, and those could be volunteer patrolled and verified (similar to patrolling of pending changes).
Rules would be tweaked until consistent and widely agreeable results are achieved.
The user's raw edit count (all edits) would also be readily available.
This should not be viewed as controversial, as it's really just a system admin area, like firewall maintenance: the rule set would be there for all to see, and all editors could continually comment and make suggestions. Changes would result in automatic recalculation across all users. Whether this could be technically implemented at reasonable cost, and if it would be a significant drain on server resources, seem to be the only limiting questions. (I've been thinking about a somewhat similar semi-automated approach to RfCs...) --Tsavage (talk) 05:23, 23 November 2015 (UTC)
In respect to non-US laws
Latest comment: 9 years ago10 comments5 people in discussion
The discussion, Wikipedia:Possibly unfree files/2015 November 10#File:Australian Aboriginal Flag.svg, resulted in "keep[ing]" the Australian aboriginal flag and solely relying on US law to deem it free to use in English Wikipedia. Of course we are not legal experts, according to disclaimers. I tried similar discussion but just about WP:non-U.S. copyrights page at WP:VPP, but other things overshadow that issue, and then that discussion is now archived. I was thinking about proposing to either add more headquarters, add more rules, or change rules. However, I want the issue to be brought to wide attention. I don't editors to believe that it is okay to distribute something copyrighted to online, even when it may not be copyrightable in the U.S. But administrators want to stick to US laws. Any ideas? George Ho (talk) 22:02, 20 November 2015 (UTC)
My idea is this: ignore foreign laws. Otherwise, Germany can dictate that we remove all swastikas, China can dictate that we remove all references to Falun Gong, Saudi Arabia can dictate that we remove all depictions of Mohammad, and North Korea can dictate that we remove all material critical of their Great Leader. --Guy Macon (talk) 22:32, 20 November 2015 (UTC)
Maybe copyright is not one of top important things after all? Do these countries have advanced technology to block these depictions on Internet? --George Ho (talk) 22:42, 20 November 2015 (UTC)
"Ignore foreign laws", for the reasons that Guy Macon gives. WMF is based in the U.S. (California) and its primary web hosting is in the U.S. (Virginia) so it has to respect U.S. laws and no others. [Except, does the cache in Amsterdam have to respect Dutch law?] The drawback is that WP is US-centric, not truly international, because while it can ignore the sensitivities of all other countries in the world, U.S. sensitivities must be meticulously respected. Stanning (talk) 15:26, 22 November 2015 (UTC)
Let me ask this. In some countries, it is illegal to display certain images. Should Wikipedia respect those laws and not display those images on its articles, even if they are perfectly legal to be displayed in the United States and most other western countries? There are plenty of other cases where US law and the laws of other countries directly conflict with each other in regard to the dissemination of certain information. If Wikipedia allows countries—or other groups/individuals using the laws of other countries—to have a "veto" on the dissemination of certain information, what does that do to the mission of Wikipedia? —Farix (t | c) 18:26, 22 November 2015 (UTC)
Since Wikipedia is subject to U.S. law, the U.S. – or groups/individuals using U.S. laws – have a "veto" on the dissemination of certain information. What does that do to the mission of Wikipedia? Stanning (talk) 21:31, 22 November 2015 (UTC)
I think we just have to add a warning to any media that we know to be a problem. Then it is up to reusers if they comply with the local laws, and they will be informed. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 23:23, 22 November 2015 (UTC)
Yes, that seems like the solution. I see that we already have Category:Restriction tags, and equivalents in Commons:Category:Non-copyright restriction templates, which seem intended for images; maybe we need standard templates with warning text to appear in articles which mention matters that are known to be legally restricted in certain countries (but legal in the U.S.)? Or do such already exist? And to raise awareness of the issues among editors (those who are paying attention) and/or patrollers? Stanning (talk) 10:17, 23 November 2015 (UTC)
For someone who has just done a search on the English Language Wikipedia, and wants to do a search for the same string on the German Wikipedia, the choices seem to be
a long series of clicks from that page, to main page to a location with a list of Wikipedias going to german, going and searching there
knowing what the code (de) is for the other language and altering the URL (which works even though the information in the header may not be quite right for the other wikipedia.
How difficult would it be to add the complete list of languages on the left side the way that wikidata or interwiki links cause articles to be listed?Naraht (talk) 15:41, 19 November 2015 (UTC)
Easier access to biography articles via subject surname?
Latest comment: 9 years ago14 comments8 people in discussion
This idea in a nutshell: Could/Should there be a Category or similar listing of all biographical articles by DEFAULTSORT so that disambiguation or surname pages could include a useful link to the A-Z point showing holders of that surname?
A reader may well approach the encyclopedia wanting to find out about a person with surname "Xyzname", when they do not know the person's forename(s) or initial(s). They may have read or heard some mention of "Dr Xyzname", or "After Xyzname's breakthrough work in this field", or "the followers of Xyzname". If this happens to be a string of characters which is only ever used as a surname (say Higginbottom), they mght find a surname page (this one has 5 entries), or they might do a Wikipedia search (if they know how to do this, bypassing the link to the surname page) and see a listing of 11 people surnamed Higginbottom. But if the surname they are looking for is something like "Leeds" they've got a problem. The base name page has a hatnote pointing to Leeds (disambiguation), which has a link to Leeds (surname), but there's no knowing how complete this is (though I did what I could with it earlier today). If they do a search on the word "Leeds", the results will include people with the surname, mixed up with a load of other articles (just one of the first page of 20 hits is a person with the surname).
There are different views among the Disambiguation community about whether entries for "people with the surname Xyzname" belong on the "Xyzname (disambiguation)" page, and if so where: a change to WP:MOSDAB in May 2015 means that they are now to be added to the "See also" section (which, to my mind,then gets very cluttered) until a separate Xyzname (name) page is created. (There is separate provision for people like "Lincoln", "Shakespeare" and "Churchill", who are recognised as being commonnly referred to by surname alone: those aren't the people I'm worrying about here). But such listings, wherever they are, are always likely to be incomplete anyway - as with our Higginbottoms above.
For living people, it's possible to create a link to the appropriate A-Z section of Category:Living people (like this). It's slightly inelegant in that it continues on beyond the chosen surname, but it's otherwise pretty good: a listing by surname - ie using the "DEFAULTSORT" that many of us carefully add to every biographical article we ever see.
If there was a listing which was the equivalent of "Category:All people" (ie living, dead, or unknown), sorted by DEFAULTSORT, then we could add a link to the "Xyzname" point in this sorted list as a really useful enhancement to the "See also" section of every disambiguation page where the word being disambiguated is ever used as a surname/family name/"the name used as a sort key". It would also be useful on every surname page, to provide an up-to-date listing to complement the handcrafted annotated listing on the page itself.
There could perhaps be a template to add to the "See also" section of appropriate disambiguation pages, which would provide this link, with text saying "List of people with surname Xyzname", in the same way that {{look from}} and {{in title}} are often added. With real sophistication, maybe the template could produce a list cut off at an appropriate endpoint (the next possible word, perhaps, eg "Xyznamf" for "Xyzname" - that way we'd get all the compound names included too).
But the prerequisite is for there to exist a category, or category-like listing (not necessarily updated in real time, perhaps every day/week if it would otherwise be too demanding of the system) which includes every biographical article in the encyclopedia, sorted by their DEFAULTSORT. The totality of the categories listed under Category:People categories by parameter, and all the child categories down to the last generation, with duplicates deduplicated, would seem one possible definition. (Not the subcategories of Category:People because that includes a lot of non-biog stuff like flags and books).
Perhaps such a category already exists and is used for some operations I know nothing about? Perhaps there are technical reasons why it can't be done? Perhaps the consensus is that it wouldn't be useful? I'll drop a note at a couple of relevant talk pages to alert them to this discussion. PamD17:59, 16 November 2015 (UTC)
WP:MOSDAB was changed in May after a long and sometimes acrimonious discussion. As far as I can see, the discussion didn't address the point that PamD raises, or even consider the matter from the point of view of an actual user of Wikipedia; but even so, I suspect that any attempt to re-visit the topic any time soon would be dismissed out of hand. Putting name lists in the "See also" section of a disambiguation page seems strange, and user-unfriendly; but there's nothing that can be done about it now. Having said that: name disambiguation pages, even ones of the form Xyzname (name), are difficult for following up references such as PamD's examples (mentions of "Dr Xyzname", or "After Xyzname's breakthrough work in this field") because if there's a lot of people with the surname, often everyone called "Charles Xyzname" will be hived off into Charles Xyzname (disambiguation) and similarly with other common forenames such as David, Thomas, William, etc., which makes searching tedious and difficult. Sometimes name pages are divided in other ways. I wonder whether in the long term it would be useful to have an easily-accessible search tool that would filter Wikipedia searches by reference to the subjects' properties in Wikidata. Not a user-unfriendly search where you enter language like "search for 'Xyzname' with 'instance of=human'", but rather a simple, accessible search, perhaps with tick-boxes for "People", etc. Not all biography articles in Wikipedia have corresponding Wikidata items yet, but that can be fixed. Stanning (talk) 15:15, 18 November 2015 (UTC)
@WhatamIdoing:, @Gadfium:, @Stanning: Thanks for reading and commenting. I suspect I didn't make myself clear. What I suggest is not any manually-maintained list or set of pages like the ones deleted in 2007. The existing "NAMESORT" system specifies how names are to be sorted within categories, and is one of the prerequisites for my proposal to work.
I am suggesting that there should be a category, or a listing functioning like a category, which contains every item which is in any biographical category (including stubs) - whether Category:1917 births, Category:Mexican poets, Category:People from Headingley or Category:American football defensive back, 1980s birth stubs (some people will be in several). This list would be automatically generated, and therefore as complete as our categorisation and stub-sorting allows. It would be sorted using the NAMESORT system - ie all those with the same surname would appear together.
We could then offer a link to the relevant point in this A-Z listing as a useful "See also" link in any disambiguation page, and in any surname page, to help the reader who is looking for a person they only know by surname. For living people we can already do this - see this listing for people with the surname "Leeds", who are very difficult to find othewise because the word "Leeds" appears in so many other article titles.
The list a reader would find would be unannotated, just names - but if they have "tool-tips" activated (or is it a default - I mean the system whereby hovering over a link shows the lead sentence) they can skim through that list quickly to find the paleontologist or politician they are looking for. Even without tooltips, they have a list, in one place, of all people who have a Wikipedia article and who have that surname as their DEFAULTSORT, and that's more useful than finding the same names thinly scattered through a long list of article titles. That seems to me to be a really useful enhancement. What is needed is for the Category/Listing of "All people" to be created. Can it be done? PamD09:54, 19 November 2015 (UTC)
I believe that there would be approximately 1.3 million biographies in this category – more, if you include redirects to alternate names. Are you sure that would actually be useful? WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:17, 20 November 2015 (UTC)
I can't be sure, but I think so: no-one would want to look at the whole 1.3 million, just at the A-Z chunk which has the surname they are looking for. If it was technically easier that 1.3 million could be held in 26, or 26x26, separate files (A-Z or Aa-Zz) or any further subdivision, generated automatically. Not necessarily in real time - daily or weekly update would still provide a powerful tool.
The information in the "DEFAULTSORT" field is a valuable potential search tool which at present can't be used except within a particular category. Trad encyclopedias, on paper, offer access by surname. Wikipedia doesn't, unless the surname is a string of characters which has no other usage ("Higginbottom"). I suggest we should enable readers to find articles by the surname of the biographee, even if it's "Martin" or "Leeds". PamD09:26, 20 November 2015 (UTC)
SELECTpage_title,cl_collation,cl_sortkeyFROMcategorylinksJOINpageONcl_from=page_idWHEREpage_namespace=0ANDcl_type="page"/* Looking at a single category: 1 sec */ANDcl_toIN("Living_people")/* Looking at 2,868 categories: 2 hours */-- AND cl_to IN (SELECT cat_title FROM category WHERE cat_title LIKE "%\_births" AND cat_pages>0)ANDcl_sortkeyLIKEREPLACE(UPPER("Leeds%"),"_"," ")GROUPBYcl_from;
Suffix search mostly working in Dabfix again. On a side note we could basically bot-create every surname article with the above query. — Dispenser14:26, 20 November 2015 (UTC)
I am fairly certain we have a query on Wikidata for exactly this, or could easily have such a query. Not sure how often he logs on over on en.wp (I'll ping him later at WD), but @Jura1: probably knows. --Izno (talk) 14:49, 20 November 2015 (UTC)
I just happened to see your ping .. Surnames haven't been developed that much yet (it's being worked on now), but indexing by given name is fairly complete, at least for people from countries with Latin script (sample). Jura1 (talk) 18:10, 20 November 2015 (UTC)
I'd have thought indexing by surname would be much more useful than by forename, as providing something which can't be done using {{look from}}. PamD04:49, 26 November 2015 (UTC)
General, non-spam blacklist?
Latest comment: 9 years ago7 comments5 people in discussion
I know we have a spam blacklist, but do we have a unique blacklist for sites that are definitively established as unreliable by various Wikiprojects/the greater community? And if not, why not? I've been doing a lot of editing in the world of Indian cinema over the last year or more, not out of familiarity or interest in the niche, but out of frustration with the corruption that is so obvious and rampant. If the Indian cinema task force were to conclude through discussion that various sites were not deemed reliable, (let's say koimoi.com and boxofficeindia.com) they'd still have to manually remove thousands of unreliably sourced submissions each year, because there's nothing preventing the addition of these sources except for eagle-eyed editors, and the bulk of editing in this realm is by SPAs, sock farms, paid editors, and people who seem to think that the most recent higher box office estimate is the most accurate estimate, regardless of where it comes from. That sucks up a ton of volunteer time unnecessarily. This isn't limited to Indian cinema of course, because any time that someone submits a reference from forum.toonzone.net, that too should be on the blacklist, since nothing at that discussion forum is of value to the project. Or Wikia? Thoughts? Cyphoidbomb (talk) 03:10, 24 November 2015 (UTC)
I've tried getting a series of scanlation websites that distributed copyrighted works without the permission of the copyright owners put on the blacklist one time, but was rejected because it was considered "proactive" and there was no evidence of abuse. The original list was the catalyst for User:TheFarix/Scanlation websites, which I scan through every once in a while to find links to be removed. —Farix (t | c) 13:15, 24 November 2015 (UTC)
TheFarix That's a lot of hard work to go ignored! Blacklisting sites that promote copyright violations seems like the academically correct thing to do. Although what would we do about YouTube, which contains a mix of copyright violations and decent stuff? Moot point, I suppose. Cyphoidbomb (talk) 17:53, 24 November 2015 (UTC)
In my opinion we ought to at least make considerations for scenarios such as this, where highly-unreliable sources are being utilized en masse. Unrelated to the realm of cinema, there are almost 2,000 links to skyscraper enthusiast website SkyscraperCity. These links appear as cited references within the Wikipedia articles, and nearly all of them redirect to the SkyscraperCity web forum (WP:USERGENERATED content). [6] I have brought up this concern today on WP:ANI at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents#Continued_disruptive_editing_by_Mohsin17 and am interested as to current best practices when confronted with these situations. Regards, Yamaguchi先生 (talk) 02:17, 25 November 2015 (UTC)
The examples above look to me exactly as spam, and they have been actually used for spamming already (that's important). So, I think they can be simply reported to the existing spam blacklist noticeboard. However, blacklisting websites simply because they are not reliable sources in general, but still can be used for sourcing certain specific claims or represent useful links, is not a good idea. My very best wishes (talk) 04:41, 25 November 2015 (UTC)
Thank you My very best wishes. What might the negative impact(s) be if, for example, www.skyscrapercity.com were to be added to the English Wikipedia Spam-blacklist? There would be at least one legitimate use case at SkyscraperCity out of the 1,934 existing links back. I should state that I am relatively new to this aspect of Wikipedia, advice is welcome. Regards, Yamaguchi先生 (talk) 18:18, 25 November 2015 (UTC)
I don't even see a legitimate use case at SkyscraperCity, considering the reference is simply a link to the forum's home page, not even to an about page, as the reference claims (in fact the Wiki article's existence here is dubious to begin with — it's been AfD'd 3 times with the result delete each time, why is it still here?). In my opinion, there would be little negative impact to blacklisting a forum of this sort. The only time I could see a negative impact is if a post were made by someone important in the field and it would be prudent to use the link as a primary reference, though in this case it seems rather unlikely and if it were to be required I'm sure some kind of exception could be made in that one instance. DiscantX09:20, 26 November 2015 (UTC)
Article Deleted
Latest comment: 9 years ago7 comments3 people in discussion
I may be interested in giving a hand in this, though I can't guarantee how much time I'll be able to commit to it. DiscantX04:15, 23 November 2015 (UTC)
Latest comment: 9 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
I would like to propose that the ability to submit a user sandbox to Articles for Creation be disabled. The ability to submit a subpage of a user sandbox, a subpage of a user, or a draft page should be the ways to submit an article to Articles for Creation. The direct submission of sandboxes to AFC has several problems. First, as User:Anne Delong has wisely observed, sometimes when a sandbox draft is good, the sandbox is moved by a reviewer either first into draft space and then into article space, or directly in article space. This results in a redirect from the sandbox, and the creation of the redirect is in the sandbox history as an edit by the accepting reviewer. Then if the sandbox is reused by the user, which is permitted, it has a weird edit history. As a result, if the new draft in the sandbox is tagged for speedy deletion, or moved into draft space and nominated for MFD, or any of various similar actions taken, the accepting reviewer is notified of the action, and she had nothing to do with it. That is a problem that occasionally happens if the draft is good. On the other hand, at AFC, I have often seen sandboxes submitted to AFC that were not draft articles. They may have been test edits, permitted in sandboxes, or they may have been user page drafts. However, the inexperienced editor submitted the sandbox to AFC, probably not knowing that they were submitting it to AFC. This makes it necessary for an AFC reviewer to decline the draft politely as probably not meant to be a draft. So submission of sandboxes can cause problems either if the draft is good or if the draft is not meant to be a draft. Don't enable primary user sandboxes to be submitted for AFC. Robert McClenon (talk) 18:46, 27 November 2015 (UTC)
Community Voting or Flagging of false dangerous or misleading information, similar to Web of Trust.
Latest comment: 9 years ago3 comments3 people in discussion
Users could login via open ID, facebook, email or wiki profile.. or not even login with IP, OS, Hardware, User facial recog id in order to enforce voting for truthful, safe and accurate information on wikipedia, including similar trust ranking factors for MLA cited content. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 50.4.230.86 (talk) 06:30, 28 November 2015 (UTC)
Latest comment: 9 years ago4 comments3 people in discussion
Along with the project page, talk, edit page, history and such tabs, I would appreciate a bookmark tab that allows a registered user to bookmark an article. The watchlist tab is not good enough because it just shows recent changes and a number of updates. If a user has an article or a number of articles of interest to edit or read later on, a simple bookmark tab should allow them to so. It should work in the same manner as a normal Google Chrome, Internet Explorer or Mozzarella Firefox browser and should be accessible for the user along with sandbox, preferences, beta, watchlist and contributions list. Checkmark boxes should be next to each link to a bookmarked page for checking and pressing the delete button for the user to remove any article from the list that they no longer want in their bookmarks.
The bookmarks list should also be in alphabetical order and listed under each letter to make it easier for the user to find. I propose this because there are time I just want to save access to a title I don't remember that I'd like to revisit later. I don't really care about recent changes, I just want to access it at some later time for editing/expanding or reading later on and a bookmark tab would really be useful.--Nadirali نادرالی (talk) 05:37, 30 November 2015 (UTC)
Nadirali, there's some potential in what you suggest, but why not just put the page you want to recall in the boookmarks/favorites/whatever (or sub-folder thereof) of your browser? An advantage of doing it within Wikipedia might be that the bookmarks would be accessible from wherever you access the net, but you can do that with browser bookmarks too. Stanning (talk) 10:00, 30 November 2015 (UTC)
Stanning, because bookmarks come in list form and you have too many pages to save both on and off Wiki. A wiki page with bookmarks sorted in alphabetical order would help the user a great deal to work on and read pages later on.--Nadirali نادرالی (talk) 21:55, 30 November 2015 (UTC)
Solidarity with Library Genesis and Sci-Hub
Latest comment: 6 years ago11 comments9 people in discussion
While Wikipedia must use closed access journals for citations, we should show Solidarity with Library Genesis and Sci-Hub somehow.
Some ideas:
unlinking the citations, e.g. by wrapping the urls in 'nowiki', or by removing 'http://' / 'https://' prefixes from the URLs, so they may still be copied and pasted into the URL bar, but can not be simply clicked.
adding a redirecter tool, so links to closed access journals first show a message about Library Genesis[7] and Sci-Hub(URL removed --DMacks (talk) 14:22, 4 December 2018 (UTC)), with a link to the intended closed resource that the reader can click on to continue to the desired closed access journal.
No. We're an encyclopedia first, and should not get into the game of making it more difficult for people to access information—whether in open or closed format. Ed[talk][majestic titan]03:18, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
However, this might be worth a ping over to one of the WMF law-type folks. They might be interested in supporting The Small Guys against Elsevier. --Izno (talk) 04:01, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
@John Vandenberg: It's still possible to occasionally link libgen.io/scimag/get.php?doi=$DOI. But when you make it too public, this option will be lost, because WMF cannot tolerate illegal links. Show you solidarity by keepin' low profile.--Kopiersperre (talk) 12:20, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
I don't believe we should link to libgen.io or sci-hub.io at all, at least not in articles, and currently it looks like we don't (based on Special:LinkSearch/libgen.org). I'm more interested reducing sending our readers to closed access journals, and adding our own DOI service which engages the reader when the linked journal article is not known to be open access, explaining the problem that closed access journals cause to our editors and readers (and a limited number of 'free' accounts are not a scalable solution), and possibly asking them to help Wikipedia by replacing the closed access citation with an open access citation, if they are aware of a suitable citation in an open access journal. John Vandenberg(chat)12:53, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
I think that we need stable links, and it is more likely to assume that the publishers will keep their addresses, than libgen, I'm afraid :( However, I think it would be really good if we used open access links whenever possible. There should be really strong reasons to use closed access links. Most of our readers don't have access to those databases. Pundit|utter16:26, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
I sympathize with the frustrations around our use of closed resources. I can't endorse linking to copyright infringement though, however legitimate the underlying moral claims are. As John suggested, I think the better strategy is helping readers find OA versions of sources, give them avenues to request articles that are paywalled from their authors, tag content that is OA, and additionally link to repository versions or url resolvers for better discovery. We started brainstorming ideas over the past several weeks for a bot that could do this here: WP:TWL/OABOT. It meshes nicely with @Daniel Mietchen:'s work on signalling open access, and I hope we can join forces to prototype something in the new year. Cheers, Jake Ocaasi (WMF) (talk) 18:14, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
+1 to Ocaasi's comments: I think there is also considerable room for exploring something like Google Scholar's ability to surface institutional repository copies: which are legal, contract-legal pre-paywall versions of Journal articles. We met someone at last years ALA, that recommended exploring that direction: we would love to, but could use additional help guiding the conversation and getting the right tools in the Wikimedia community. There are a lot of complicated questions with open access resources: Is the correct strategy to focus on an OA labeling bot only? How can we make discovery of OA resources easy for Wikipedia editors and our readers outside of the labeled reference context? Do we want to use the API of another tool (like Google Scholar) to surface free to use versions from legal spaces, as User:Cyberbot II is doing with Internet Archive's Wayback machine? These are all open conversations that we need the community to give direction on -- and can't only be steered from the WMF. Most of those conversations can should be worked on with the community over at Wikipedia:WikiProject_Open_Access, and should be paired with Daniel Mietchen's work on OA signalling and WikiSource, Astinson (WMF) (talk) 20:29, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
I think the Wikimedia community is in a unique position to make research more accessible, and there are many activities around that, as summarized here and here. The best way to help the case of sharing research is probably to improve the information we have around open access, paywalls, copyright transfer agreements and those many other related topics, to highlight the value of open access by citing and reusing text or media, to add licensing information to Wikidata items about scholarly papers and to engage editors and readers around that, which is what WP:OPENACCESS is about.
With the Open Access Signalling project (for which we have functional prototype components that we are in the process of combining into a coherent workflow), we have chosen to highlight open access resources rather than to name and shame non-open or paywalled ones. While a similar approach in a psychology journal indicates that such a badging strategy can indeed raise awareness about sharing and increase the propensity of authors to actually do it, we are also concerned with saving users those frustrating clicks that end up on a paywall. If we could come up with a good technical solution here, I would certainly be in favour of giving it a try. The proposed OABOT is muddingly named (as it is about highlighting legal public copies of non-open stuff) but otherwise a good complement to signalling openly licensed content (which we are planning to do by linking to the Wikisource and Commons copies of the imported materials) and signalling paywalls. Having a link to paywalled content first lead to some on-wiki page (or pop-up) that informs about open access and warns of the paywall but still links to it (alongside legal free copies) would be an interesting twist. Help with any of that would be much appreciated. --Daniel Mietchen (talk) 23:20, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
Wikipedia as a component of artificial intelligence
Latest comment: 9 years ago7 comments5 people in discussion
I was thinking that "wouldn't it be weird if Wikipedia became the first artificial sentience?"
Then I remembered that Wikipedia is part of Watson. That is, it is included in Watson's data banks.
So, Wikipedia is part of what Watson knows, its awareness, and eventually, when Watson wakes up, it will be part if its sentience.
But, Wikipedia is also an evolving program/data/computer complex in its own right, including a core program stack (MediaWiki +) and a small army of bots, installed on a massive array of servers, the whole of which is growing exponentially. So it is possible, that Wikipedia itself could become sentient.
Would it be weird? Yes. But if Wikipedia scripts evolve to the point of making it self-editing, then I suppose it is possible. More likely though such capabilities will be developed elsewhere then migrated into Wikipedia. Praemonitus (talk) 18:44, 9 November 2015 (UTC)
well Wikipedia is the dotty professor of the AI world. and regardless of anything else, it is still only a web page, not a semi-autonomous robot and not even a computer. so if the Singularity ever did happen, then Wikipedia would possibly be literally the least of our problems. :-/ --Sm8900 (talk) 20:51, 11 November 2015 (UTC)
I'd see something like Google as becoming sentient more so than Wikipedia. There is no mechanism in place to make Wikipedia become "aware." You'd need a form of machine learning for that to happen, which doesn't exist here. As a machine, Wikipedia is primitive. It's the editors that do the thinking, not the computers. But you mention Watson, which is why I mention Google. Much of the information that pops up in a Google search (ie. in the "infoboxes" on the side) comes from here. It's possible that an advanced AI, if such a thing ever comes to be, will learn from Wikipedia, but it won't be Wikipedia itself doing the thinking. DiscantX13:26, 15 November 2015 (UTC)
Wikipedia has the 3 necessary components: hardware, software, and data. Yes, they are primitive. But that may change, along with funding, collaboration, personnel, etc. The Transhumanist07:41, 17 November 2015 (UTC)
sorry, but you left out one necessary ingredient. it needs to have autonomous software. ordinary software is in every device these days even home appliances. --Sm8900 (talk) 18:25, 8 December 2015 (UTC)
Cross-wiki idea: Request photos/volunteer for photos
Latest comment: 9 years ago8 comments4 people in discussion
I'm not sure if something like this has been suggested, or if this is the best place to suggest it since ideally it would be a project-wide global feature. But here you go: I would like to have a feature that allows editors to request photos of article subjects, and for other editors to register as willing and available to take photos in their area. Editors can take a look at local requests and see if they have any photos or go out and take them. They have this feature on Find a Grave and it's incredible... I requested a photo of a relative's grave on the other side of the country and within a month it had been uploaded by someone nearby.
This would be more of a geographic-specific resource rather than BLP ("I need photos of a celebrity!!!"). For example, I just worked on the article on Auregnais, the extinct dialect of Norman French from the island of Alderney. There's nearly no record of this language and it's now only visible in certain signs on Alderney. No photos of street signs from Alderney are available on Flickr or any other free source. I would love to be able to request a photo that would alert a Wikipedian in the Channel Islands/Normandy of what I'm looking for. And I'd be perfectly willing to take photos of anything people wanted in my area, and before I travelled, I'd take a look to see what photos were requested in that area. I envision this feature being requestable on articles and also send alerts to people who signed up for it, with an additional centralized project on Commons that lets you browse requests. It would be really cool to have a map with pins showing "Photo requested." A little icon in the top corner of the article could indicate current requests, so random people who visited the article would also see it, and if interested learn how to upload a photo to Commons and register as a photo contributor. I think there are a lot of Wikipedians throughout the world who would be willing to go out and take a local photo someone on the other side of the world requested. What do you think? —МандичкаYO 😜 09:52, 8 December 2015 (UTC)
@Ricky81682: Thanks but these are English Wikipedia-only sources - the point is that it's global. My Channel Islands example was only that. The ideal project would be centralized across all projects, thus someone who only edits on the French Wikipedia or German Wikipedia etc would see the same information. @Atlasowa:, this is a good idea but we need something centralized where it's possible to request a photo at the article itself, rather than attempting to contact people by location one by one, many of whom may not be active. —МандичкаYO 😜 21:26, 8 December 2015 (UTC)
Thanks, I will go to Wikidata and see how this idea goes over. It definitely needs to be a cross-wiki idea that's built into the articles and Commons. I agree with what Jim.henderson mentioned above on Commons - it's poorly connected and this is the problem. —МандичкаYO 😜 00:19, 9 December 2015 (UTC)
Latest comment: 9 years ago12 comments7 people in discussion
When the edit filter was enabled on the English Wikipedia, the ability for it to block an editor who trips a filter was left disabled (see $wgAbuseFilterAvailableActionshere); there was some discussion about the option around then, but I can't see that there was ever an enacted consensus to have the feature at the time. I'd like to discuss the possibility of enabling this option, and the rules that would need to be in place to ensure that it was used appropriately.
The current strongest setting for an edit filter on the English Wikipedia is to disallow the edit, where a user is restricted from making an edit if it trips a filter set to disallow. For LTA users - as an example - this can then become a game of attempting to navigate around the filter's settings. When the user works out what they have to do to avoid the filter, they'll likely soon be blocked, the filter will be amended to fix the loophole, and they'll move to a new IP and start the process again. It could be extremely beneficial in this example to have the filter set to block the user upon their first attempt at making an edit, such that they have to switch IP before making just their second edit, slowing them down and adding an extra layer of difficulty. This is just one example of where the block option could be useful, as there are many filters which successfully target users who are always eventually blocked by patrolling admins.
If a user is blocked by the edit filter, they see MediaWiki:Abusefilter-blocked and their log shows that they have been blocked through an automated filter (though I can't currently find the exact wording). I see this option only being used when there is some amount of consensus to enable the block option for a particular filter (i.e. one editor can't decide to turn it on), and only when that filter has zero false positives for at least some length of time. I'm not sure what level of consensus would be appropriate; a standard RfC sounds good but reduces our capacity to act quickly, so perhaps something like '5 edit filter managers must agree', a 7 day RfC, or something else would be more useful. Another point to discuss is that raised by MusikAnimal, who noted that that we should perhaps have more rules regarding changing existing filters in the guideline before such a feature is enabled to avoid damage.
My sense is that this would be a fairly draconian resolution. I'd recommend that such a filter be enabled only after discussion of each individual filter where that setting is proposed; if the discussion establishes that the edit pattern caught by the filter should be "block on sight" then it can be turned on. One important consideration must be an absolute minimal chance of false positives.Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 12:02, 8 December 2015 (UTC)
I don't think I've yet seen a filter without a chance of false positives. I'm not sure when Mr.Z-bot stopped reporting users to AIV as soon as they triggered a relevant filter, but it seems a much less risky solution. -- zzuuzz(talk)13:01, 8 December 2015 (UTC)
There are a number of filters where the number of false positives over a long period of time is zero, and I'd only advocate for using the block option on these. As for the AIV reporting, I hadn't noticed either, but I think automatic blocking on the first attempt, without the delays that come with being posted to AIV and waiting, is a much better approach for some filters where blocking is a desirable outcome. Blocking immediately on the first edit is a better deterrent and saves everyone time. Sam Walton (talk) 14:20, 8 December 2015 (UTC)
I also think that sometimes one would risk a few false positives when shutting down certain particular damaging LTAs. I'm reminded of a certain Wikipedia vandal who wandered off to another website where they aggressively harassed a number of users with a cascade of socks. While all these users held off until the website got rid of that vandal I would not be surprised if some LTAs can scare off editors through abuse. In this case, a few false positive blocks may be the lesser of two evils, if other measures don't work. Making a clear block appeal pathway and perhaps some human patrolling and unblocking of mistaken blocks may alleviate issues further.Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 15:08, 8 December 2015 (UTC)
I like the idea for the purposes Sam outlines. There are indeed some filters that have never had false positives and the nature of the conditions used are with extremely high confidence only going to target the right user. The primary issue I foresee is modifying these filters, as that's where I've observed mistakes in the past. My thoughts are that for disallowing filters, any modification no matter how small must first be batch tested against recent changes, and actively monitored for a while after it is saved. In this case it is up to the discretion of the filter manager whether they should disable the disallow option while monitoring the modified filter. The same rules apply to a blocking filter, but I think in that case there should be near to no exceptions that the block option should be disabled after modifications. Then after seeing the filter is still working as intended the blocking can be re-enabled. If we can meet those guidelines I think we'll see great benefits adding blocking functionality to our most invaluable tool against long-term abuse — MusikAnimaltalk16:37, 8 December 2015 (UTC)
What is the way to see the blocks? Is there a special user that the actions are logged under. I realise that the edit filter log would record the action. But for the nature of these I expect the log will be hidden. So that only admins or edit filter editors will get to see the results. Anyway I am prepared to keep an eye on such a log. It will be even better if notifications are turned on so that someone will be alerted that such a block has taken place, and can immediately review it. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 23:09, 8 December 2015 (UTC)
Someone else might be able to give you a better answer since I'm not overly familiar with the inner workings of the abuse filter, but I think I read that the blocks are placed by User:Abuse Filter. Sam Walton (talk) 23:11, 8 December 2015 (UTC)
I have run disallow filters where I monitored the abuse log and blocked anyone who hits it. Turning on blocking filters would be easier, and so it has been on my wish list for a long time. I believe these types of filters would be most useful as temporary measures in response to ongoing, blatant vandalism. I don't think there would be sufficient time to have a special review the filters or that multiple admins should be needed to decide to turn one on – but I would expect these to be actively monitored while enabled, and to be enabled for no more than a day or so. I'd also expect that non-admin abuse filter editors not use blocking filters. Prodegotalk02:57, 9 December 2015 (UTC)
If memory serves, AbuseFilter has a setting ($wgAbuseFilterRestrictedActions) that limits editing and creating of edit filters with restricted actions to users with an additional abusefilter-modify-restricted userright. One could grant it to admins by default; they'd still need to grant themselves EFM but only admin EFMs would have the permission.Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 18:35, 10 December 2015 (UTC)
That's a good idea, and correct as far as I understand it. I think degroup is currently a restricted action so we might need to move that out to disabled. Sam Walton (talk) 19:13, 10 December 2015 (UTC)
New hockey info bar
Latest comment: 9 years ago6 comments5 people in discussion
Hello everyone.
As a huge sports fan, I am constantly going through the endless source of hockey player articles that exist on this site. However, it has recently come to my attention that all articles regarding hockey players are, dare I say it, more "simplistic" then that of the players of other major sports, such as soccer or baseball for example. For this, I would like to propose that the info box for hockey player pages be tweaked. Doing so may provide great opportunities for editors and allow those articles to really pop. Thank you in advance.
Homie C, In what way has it come to your attention? A friend told you? An article somewhere mentioned it? You noticed it yourself? And in which way should they be improved? Someone may be able to help if you are more specific about what you think needs to be done. DiscantX07:08, 30 November 2015 (UTC)
I would say that this is a fine idea, as Ice Hockey is a major sport in much or North America, and it is only fair to fans and the sport itself. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Andysbhm (talk • contribs) 00:00, 12 December 2015 (UTC)
International charity userboxes
Latest comment: 9 years ago9 comments4 people in discussion
Bad, you must not use the Amnesty International logo in the userbox, as it is non-free. But I think it is OK to have such a userbox (without logo), if 1 or more want to use it. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 20:08, 4 December 2015 (UTC)
In fact, it seems fairly widespread on the Commons to draw from scratch a similar-looking artwork and use that instead. I can do that all right. — Cheers, Steelpillow (Talk) 09:06, 5 December 2015 (UTC)
My original query remains unaddressed - is there any harm in creating userboxes for charities, especially international ones? — Cheers, Steelpillow (Talk) 09:06, 5 December 2015 (UTC)
I'd change it to "support" Amnesty rather than members. It's more expansive and probably more useful than just members. -- Ricky81682 (talk) 18:25, 8 December 2015 (UTC)
Latest comment: 9 years ago21 comments11 people in discussion
When Wikipedia was roughly two years old, I started a deliberate habit of hitting "Random Article" three times before going to bed - and forcing myself to read whatever came up. I did this as a way of widening my mind - diversifying my knowledge base. For about a year, it worked well - I read 1000 or so articles - most of which I'd never have read otherwise - and I'm quite sure it broadened my mind to read about a lot of interesting people, curious animals, wonderful places. However, gradually, I found that I was hitting article after article about rock bands that undoubtedly popped into existence, had one hit and then vanished again - I hit a TON of articles about Japanese railway stations (some person with fanatical interest had created articles for every single one of them!) - articles about freeways...more and more "junk" that didn't matter in any way to me. To the point that I can no longer reasonably do this.
It's not unreasonable that Wikipedia has those articles - I very often use the encylopedia to look up "uninteresting" things - and it's good that it has the breadth of scope to allow me to do that. But the ability to dip into it at random and find something I feel I ought to know is fading...5 million pages with probably 100,000 I'd like to read - it's getting hard to find things that are "interesting" reads in an idle moment. The front page helps a bit with that - but the way it's curated doesn't necessarily correlate with my needs here. The featured article is mostly selected for good English, good references, etc - but it's often boring as all hell. The "On this day" and "In the news" stuff is usually source of one or two good reads - but it's very patchy...and "Did you know" is limited to new articles, so very often there isn't much there yet.
So I wonder - is there a way to have a curated list of "interesting articles" that could be served up randomly? Criteria for "interesting" would be different from "good" or "featured" because writing style and such is less important than the subject matter. I understand that "interesting" for one person is "tedious" for another - but still I feel that it would be possible to create a curated category from which random picks could be made that would stand a higher-than-usual chance of being interesting to a person of intelligence who wants to broaden their general knowledge.
You presume there exists a single opinion of "interesting" articles. I would say at least Wikipedia:Vital articles is interesting. Those are your core articles that people should know and get. Level 4 needs a few hundred more suggestions so that may be an interesting project for you to get involved in. -- Ricky81682 (talk) 18:21, 8 December 2015 (UTC)
Well, I acknowledge the difficulty of determining what's "interesting" - but I doubt it's any harder (in principle) than what's "vital". But thanks for mentioning the vital articles work - I'll definitely follow up on that. Perhaps it would be valuable to have a service that would randomly serve up level 1 articles, then when you've read them all, start serving you level 2 articles and then level 3 and then finally, level 4. It could mix up the various areas of study, so you wouldn't get too much of one area at a time. At a rate of three per day (which is what I could comfortably consume without risk of brain explosions!) it would take 10 years to read them all - but after just a year you'd have all of the level 3 articles read and it would only take a month to consume all of level 2. SteveBaker (talk) 21:57, 8 December 2015 (UTC)
@SteveBaker I call these articles "database articles" because they were created with the aim of completeness (e.g. all japanese railway stations) and not because they were interesting. As Wikidata statics shows English Wikipedia as least 20 % database articles.--Kopiersperre (talk) 21:59, 8 December 2015 (UTC)
@Kopiersperre ...So there is an automatic means for detecting such articles?! How does that work? I could kinda imagine detecting articles that were created with bots - but I think that would miss (for example) all of the individual articles about every single Pokemon, Simpsons-character or StarTrek-episode articles - which are essentially "database articles". SteveBaker (talk) 16:44, 10 December 2015 (UTC)
(ec) If you define interesting as "in the same category as things I have edited/watchlisted" then this could be doable; especially if there was a feature that let you tune your settings by marking articles it shows you as interesting or uninteresting to you. I can think of several IT projects I would give a much higher priority to, but it is doable and might be something a programmer volunteers to do. ϢereSpielChequers22:00, 8 December 2015 (UTC)
I kind of disagree with the above about "vital articles" - those are often the least interesting, both to read and to write. Wikipedia's strength is in the long tail of obscure stuff that very few people at a time are interested in, but for those few people it's exactly what they were looking for. That sort of implies that the "typical" article should be boring to the "typical" reader. I am surprised that nobody's built an on-wiki recommendation engine gadget, which seems very much within the skill and commitment range of an interested volunteer or three. SuggestBot sort of fills that gap, but what you'd like to edit and what you'd like to read are probably different things. Opabinia regalis (talk) 22:13, 8 December 2015 (UTC)
The trouble with "articles related to things on my watchlist" - is that my original goal of the "read three random articles per day" thing was to broaden my self-education - precisely to explore things that I'm not looking at if left to my own devices. I want to be fed articles on fields that I know nothing about. But yes - "database articles" are to be strongly avoided. I'm not sure about the "long tail" articles. I agree that some of those are utterly fascinating - and I've tripped over many absolute gems using random-article...but I'd say that you'd want to avoid having only long-tail articles unless you want to be good at trivia quizzes - but that you need to include some of them to avoid having nothing by dry academic stuff. "Interesting" is a tough criterion to meet - and I fully understand that it's hard...but I think it would be a way to boost the encyclopedia in the eyes of an intelligent readership. SteveBaker (talk) 15:04, 10 December 2015 (UTC)
Also, a look at tweeted WP articles may be interesting. [8] There is a lot of potential to harvest article recommendations, but also a lot of noise...
Misappropriated watchlist-star on Mobile-alpha
Who needs a real watchlist anyway? Editors? ha!
There is a new "WMF Reading department" (i kid you not) that supposedly looks at similar questions. They presented a "Gather" or "collections" feature that failed their expectations (and that they wanted the admins or wikipedians to patrol, because we all have nothing better to do then clean up the next flawed sexy-new-idea of WMF...) See Special:Gather/all/public. The absolute worst thing about it is that they misappropriated the watchlist-star on mobile web Wikipedia for this crap! And it is coming back. --Atlasowa (talk) 09:56, 10 December 2015 (UTC) Ping Melamrawy (WMF) --Atlasowa (talk) 11:40, 10 December 2015 (UTC)
Hmmm - it's definitely not the same as a "bookmark" function - I bookmark something when I want to come back to an article sometime in the future and I think it would be hard to find via a regular search - I'm careful not to bookmark too many web pages because then I have problems searching my bookmarks. But because Wikipedia is so easy to search, I only have bookmarks to a couple of WP articles right now.
It's also not a "watchlist" kind of thing. I put things on my watchlist where I have some expertise and I care that some idiot isn't coming along and screwing with the article - so I get notified to go and check what got changed. Again, things on my watchlist are not necessarily articles I'd want to read -- they are universally on subjects that I already know or care about. They are most definitely not things that would help to expand my mind because they are almost always articles from the niche that my brain is already wedged into. Excluding articles similar to those on my watch-list might be a good filter!
This is more of a "like" function - where I may never want to look at the article ever again - but I'd like to recommend it to other like-minded people. A "randomly selected article with a lot of likes" might work - but I can't help thinking that inherent bias of the masses would result in me getting a bunch of articles about Donald Trump. Perhaps something like the Amazon book search thing "Other people who liked the articles that you liked also liked these...".
filter bubble by Eli Pariser, 2012Hungarian Wikipedia sidebar usage statistics 2008-02: 96.970 clicks on "random article" (hungarian: Lap találomra)
...and you'd run straight into the filter bubble problem, yes.
Basically, you are using the random button as a daily (noisy!) feed of interesting articles. I think the Swedes were smart to use an extra button (not fucking up random) and to be transparent about its effect/functionality (-bot). I think a "random popular" button would be pretty bad and boring, killing serendipity. Actually a "serendipity button" (meaning pleasant surprise) would be great, and looking at how many readers use the random button, that would be interesting for many. Just don't destroy random, because there are also very different uses for random (quality control etc.). There is also:
I absolutely do not suggest removing/replacing/changing the "Random article" button. I agree that it has an important purpose. But the serendipity use has gone...or at least you have to hit it a LOT more times to get something worth reading. So clearly, for this idea to fly, we'd need several things:
A new button.
Seems like an easy thing to do - but probably there are committees are out there guarding the left-side menu against bloat.
Getting agreement on a name for it and a succinct description of what it does. Just calling it "Serendipity" would be neat actually.
A means to decide which articles should or should not be selected by "Random interesting article". There are many possibilities here:
A bot that filters out non-interesting articles.
A bot that automatically adds interesting articles.
A means for humans to black-list non-interesting articles.
A means for humans to white-list articles that they think are interesting.
An efficient way to pick an item at random from that list.
This may not actually be a trivial concern...but it is an implementation detail that can await the resolution of (2).
The filtering is the issue here. I wonder how much interest there might be in forming a "Seredipitous article" group - akin to the "Good article" patrollers. There is an element of chicken-and-egg here - first we need a reasonable list of articles - then we need the button to search it - but until there is a reason to make a list, it'll be hard to find people who want to invest the time to do it. If the list was human-moderated, it would probably be necessary to add an icon in the article's banner just like we do for "Good" and "Featured".
One possible approach (forgive me if somebody already mentioned this above and I missed it) would be to select at random but weight by page views, or by some measure derived from page views. That way you can get articles that at least some people actually look at. Looie496 (talk) 18:56, 11 December 2015 (UTC)
Hm, close but not quite right, I think. Weighting toward page views just means that we'd almost always see the same ~100 articles that we've already seen. But I think you're on to something that is conceptually easy to address programmatically. So the long tail of page view is likely the bus stations and small towns in Hungary. But the highest page views of the week are just related to popular culture and news events, with the occasional ringer from Reddit Wikipedia:Top_25_Report. The highest page views for a year [9] also skew heavily toward "not that interesting" in my book. I mean they're fine and all, but they are pages I'm well aware of and could have gotten to by any number of other easier ways. So-- how about weighting towards articles that are say 1-2 quartiles below the top in terms of page views (for any given time frame, or all time, etc)? That way we'd see articles that are not ignored, but also not the stuff driven by current events, celebrity deaths, etc. SemanticMantis (talk) 19:30, 11 December 2015 (UTC)
"select at random but weight by page views" I was going to suggest exactly this too. I'm pretty sure the most popular article still has a tiny fraction of a percent of the total page views so I imagine it would work well. I don't see a need to filter further by quality, as it's not a bad idea to draw attention to popular articles which need attention. —Pengo01:27, 12 December 2015 (UTC)
Here is a filter: article finder tool: articles per category (with subcats to depth X) with minimum views Y and maximum completeness Z (0-100) (not sure if this works currently?)
While, obviously, the knee-jerk reaction here is to say that "interesting" isn't defined, I think we could define large categories of "uninteresting" articles, or at least large categories of articles that don't have a high degree of uniqueness.
Anything that was bot-created, and then not changed substantially.
Articles that are parts of set. Articles like rail-way stations and individual television episodes are rarely very unique, and usually require reading the over-arching article first. (The article Lost (TV Show) is interesting, But individual episodes are interesting only to someone already familiar with the show.
Articles that are basically just bullet lists. Most albums, for example.
I don't know how you'd separate them out, but I'm tempted to wonder if sorting by total number of bytes wouldn't get you a large part of the way there.
Bumping thread for 30 days. ceradon (talk • edits) 04:23, 2 August 2015 (UTC)
Done. DMacks (talk) 20:33, 27 September 2015 (UTC)
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Misappropriated watchlist-star on Mobile-alpha
Who needs a real watchlist anyway? Editors? ha!
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