Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Archive 87

• Village pump
  • Policy
  • Technical
  • Proposals (persistent)
  • Idea lab
  • WMF
  • Miscellaneous

Village pump (proposals) archive  

This page contains discussions that have been archived from Village pump (proposals). Please do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to revive any of these discussions, either start a new thread or use the talk page associated with that topic.

---

< Older discussions · Archives: A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z, AA, AB, AC, AD, AE, AF, AG, AH, AI, AJ, AK, AL, AM, AN, AO, AP, AQ, AR · 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193, 194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211, 212, 213, 214, 215

Wikipedia needs a training ground

One of the most pressing problems facing Wikipedia at the moment is declining editorship. This is largely due to the fact that Wikipedia has become an unwelcoming place for new editors unfamiliar with the rules and mores we've developed over the years. The "Article feedback tool" was one method tried to remedy this, but it has proven largely a joke, at least for the articles I edit. A better idea, I think, would simply be to make Wikipedia more welcoming to visitors. Right now, the "how to" sections on Wikipedia are faceless, intimidating blocks of text, hidden behind tiny search icons on the side of the page. What is needed is a user-friendly interactive website, complete with audio, video and its own cadre of dedicated users who will handhold new editors through their first attempts. I would also suggest a "training ground" be set up consisting of ~1000 duplicate articles on which new editors can be politely led through the dos and don'ts without getting their heads bitten off by irate editors. Serendi^podous 19:36, 21 March 2012 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Teahouse is one place for new editors. They might be interested in your ideas. Also see Wikipedia:Welcoming committee. Fences&Windows 19:41, 21 March 2012 (UTC)

Firstly, I dispute that declining editorship is a pressing issue. It's natural that we have fewer editors once the "easy" subjects already have articles.

Second, while some video "how to" lessions might be useful, it's impossible to "hand hold" every new person who decides to edit. For one thing, that would interfere with the "anyone can edit" philosophy that the WMF adheres to. People are encouraged to jump right in, and attempts to change this have been sharply turned down by the WMF, Jimbo in particular. As long as the WMF adheres to this philosophy, we cannot segregate new users into "the kiddie pool," as it were. — The Hand That Feeds You:^Bite 19:56, 21 March 2012 (UTC)

I'm not advocating segregation. People will still be allowed to edit as they see fit, but interested newbies who genuinely want to help should be given a place where they will feel secure and welcomed, rather than chased off by the usual crop of angry farmers. Serendi^podous 18:27, 24 March 2012 (UTC)

The problem is not all newbies are constructive or willing and lot of them make irritating little edits or refuse to listen to advice. I frequently welcome newbies to the project but if I offer them some tips on sourcing and categorization in my experience I'm usually blindly ignored and they rarely return anyway. The ones who want to edit and learn the ropes will happily take the advice and contribute so a "training ground" would not exactly change the situation. I'm not exactly seeing a declining editorship either. Obviously we've lost a lot of good eggs through petty bureacracy and bullying on here but I'm seeing quite a diversity of new articles coming in, even if we no longer have 1700 articles a day as we had in 2007.♦ Dr. Blofeld 19:59, 21 March 2012 (UTC)

I'm working at WP:AFC and in my experience most editors are now SPAs not wanting to do more than their "own" article and not even want to link this in other articles. It's - as Blofeld already said - not a problem of the system... mabdul 21:02, 21 March 2012 (UTC)

Hey Mabdul! I'm sure you'd agree, though, that's most editors there - not most new editors over the whole project. --Demiurge1000 (talk) 21:19, 21 March 2012 (UTC)

No, I think this is a problem that is getting more and more problematic: Many users are only SPAs and simply don't want to care about related/other articles. mabdul 22:19, 21 March 2012 (UTC)

That's my impression as well, and goes some way to accounting for the diminishing number of editors willing to review the work of others. Malleus Fatuorum 22:26, 21 March 2012 (UTC)

@Serendipodous, I think this is a grand idea, but I would make it a seperate project. Perhaps something like WikiTraining. IMHO, Wikipedia has become user-un-friedly to good faith new users. And that means the only ones that are persistant are the SPAs, COIs and vandals, which is not a good position for Wikipedia to be in. 64.40.61.74 (talk) 10:53, 22 March 2012 (UTC)

UNINDENT

I think the original poster idea has some context to it, take me for example i am dsylexic and struggle to learn new rules that might be affecting a article i am doing or new code like for example cite book i recently used but had never used it before. So i say a training ground even for established editors would be a good thing as no editor here can stay they know Wikipedia inside out so at one point they will come across something and then need to use Wikipedia pages on that thing to learn it, have a training ground with video etc not just for new editors but existing editors would be very welcomed by me. Although some will say there sandbox, sandbox will only help to make a new article without affecting a current one but a training ground would help with the coding of the article as well--Andrewcrawford (talk - contrib) 12:23, 22 March 2012 (UTC)

Thinking in terms of radical solutions and Thinking Outside the WikiBox, I think one thing which would work superbly well would be a kind of video game where people can "play" picking up "treasures" (WikiPoints) by going from room to room, answering puzzles, typing in text in wikimarkup, p[roving that they can understand one policy before moving on to the next "level", and things like that. A lot of people who really enjoy video games would learn huge amounts about Wikipedia that way, and those who can;t stand video games would still have the trad. route to go. I also really like the idea of interactive video tutorials, with screenshots, try-it-yourself sections, and all that stuff. If we have anyone on board who can code such stuff, it would be very interesting to try it. Pesky (talk) 12:47, 22 March 2012 (UTC)

@Serendipodous: I am currently working on Wikipedia:The Wikipedia Adventure (see also User:Dcoetzee/The Wikipedia Adventure) now as a class project. It is an interactive website, although somewhat different from what you envision. I'll post about it when it's ready to start testing. Dcoetzee 21:07, 22 March 2012 (UTC)

One thing that might help would be to require new accounts to take a short, simple, and easy quiz (no more than a dozen questions, with the answers given right next to the question). IP editors wouldn't be affected, but anyone who registers would have to at least read a paragraph (no more than twenty sentences) summarizing WP:FIVE and a few other relevant policies and guidelines like WP:TALK, WP:RS, WP:OWN, and WP:GNG.

This way, regular and experienced editors would have to spend less time explaining these things to new accounts, and it would be clearer who is a bad-faith SPA and who isn't.

The problem with videos or text is that someone can just skip them or avoid them entirely. If they have to actually pay attention to a concise summary of site policies and guidelines to make an usable account, there is no excuse for not knowing not to call someone an asshole for reverting an uncited edit.

Dcoetzee's Wikipedia Adventure is also a great idea, though it seems a bit large for a mandatory intro. Perhaps use that as another means of determining autoconfirmed users? Ian.thomson (talk) 19:01, 24 March 2012 (UTC)

I'm a little wary of "mandatory"; the whole point of the idea in the first place was not to scare GF users off; I think an initiation ceremony, partiucularly one that excluded anonymous editors, would go a long way towards doing just that. At the very least, Wikipedia's main page should have a well-placed message that says, New to editing? Click here. Serendi^podous 19:07, 24 March 2012 (UTC)

Agree w/ Serendi on the "New to editing? click here" idea, as opposed to a mandatory intro. Much more user-friendly. Also note WP:THEEND, not a "training ground" per se, but targeted at users (new or somewhat experienced) who feel overwhelmed at the seemingly "endless" array of policies & guidelines. Designed to give an overview of the WP editing philosophy in simple and concise language.--JayJasper (talk) 19:33, 24 March 2012 (UTC)

Agreed ⌯☲Zenith042☲⌯ 04:07, 29 March 2012 (UTC)

Turning "Stand-alone lists (television)" into an essay

Wikipedia:Stand-alone lists (television) (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs)

This page is a failed proposal. I wonder if this page must be converted into an essay. --George Ho (talk) 23:52, 26 March 2012 (UTC)

There's no such requirement, AFAIK. --Cybercobra (talk) 01:58, 27 March 2012 (UTC)

If everyone here approves per WP:SNOW, maybe I must move this into WP:editor assistance/Requests. So far right now, I'm still waiting for consensus. --George Ho (talk) 02:42, 27 March 2012 (UTC)

There's a decent suggestion for how to proceed on the talk page. Alternately, maybe this could be userfied to someone interested on working on it, who could then develop it either by taking into consideration input from others involved in this type of page or in the discussion of the proposal, so that it could be brought forward for consensus again; or be redeveloped into an essay. It's likely that WP:Editor Assistance/Requests may get more input into the matter. Wabbott9 Tell me about it.... 00:55, 28 March 2012 (UTC)

 Done Since it was never posted on WP:Editor Assistance/Requests and there is new discussion on the talk page, I converted it into an essay. If there is consensus, we can propose it for guideline again. Taric25 (talk) 03:16, 7 April 2012 (UTC)

I was the one who created the proposal. I support turning it into an essay. If it does go to WP:Editor Assistance/Requests, just let me know on my talk page, thanks. Taric25 (talk) 13:24, 28 March 2012 (UTC)

Initiative to get us ready for World IPv6 Launch

While World IPv6 Launch day, 06 June 2012, is still far away, we have bazillions of scripts that need re-writing and numerous policies to update before we could be ready. The WMF is more likely to prioritize it if we, the community, actively pursue it.

I don't know whether this should qualify as a WikiProject or not (since it's not a content project), but I think it's important that we start now so unexpected events don't make us late again.Jasper Deng (talk) 18:47, 25 March 2012 (UTC)

Are there a lot of user scripts that are dependent on IP addresses? Or did you mean a different type of script? Equazcion ^(talk) 19:00, 25 Mar 2012 (UTC)

Specifically, Toolserver scripts (many), Twinkle, pop-ups (major), Huggle (though it's not a script), some bots like TorNodeBot and ProcseeBot, and custom user warning scripts.Jasper Deng (talk) 19:27, 25 March 2012 (UTC)

Good idea then. I create Wikipedia:WikiProject IPv6. It's currently just a skeleton based on {{wikiproject}}. Anyone should feel free to fill in the blanks and get stuff going. Equazcion ^(talk) 19:47, 25 Mar 2012 (UTC)

Got some of those fields ready.Jasper Deng (talk) 20:06, 25 March 2012 (UTC)

• Those would be awesome :). If anyone has the technical knowledge necessary, btw; one of the early tasks that would free up our devs to work on other things is to puppetise NfSen. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 23:49, 26 March 2012 (UTC)

  I don't think that regular users have an idea what puppet is, so far to be able to do any work on that Petrb (talk) 14:52, 30 March 2012 (UTC)

• But we really only need one who knows what that means and can do it. Perhaps the request could be spammed to pages where technical folks hang out (e.g., VPT or some user's talk pages). WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:33, 31 March 2012 (UTC)

Paid for articles

What I'd like to see when a new page is created, is a message: Click here if you have created this under contract with the company that has employed you to create the article. Then automatically add to it: Category: Article written or edited under contract. Some of us are having our time wasted in dealing with with non-notable paid-for-articles. This wont catch everyone but it will help keep track of the flood --Aspro (talk) 17:17, 28 March 2012 (UTC)

That's kinda like having a sign in a store, "If you are shoplifting, please wait under this sign." I don't think it will actually help. — The Hand That Feeds You:^Bite 18:33, 28 March 2012 (UTC)

Copywriters are not very bright people. They see a contract on offer and think “I can do that”. If most don't bother to read through wiki-policies, why are they all going to see this and think !!!!!? That's why they end up writing such encyclopedic drivel. Then leaving the rest of us with the hassle of going though a complicated, time- consuming (and least I forget to say fair to everyone) AfD processes, which still ends up as Deleate anyhow. As Albert Einstein is quoted as saying: “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results”. Well hell, haven’t we seen this time and time and time again? Lets stack the pack of cards so that they fall over in our direction, once-in-a-while.--Aspro (talk) 19:04, 28 March 2012 (UTC)

I would think that most companies would not like a speedy delete and advert template on their articles, so one would think they would expect an acceptable article written before they pay out. An editor wouldn't get much more work if his history showed lots of his work deleted.--Canoe1967 (talk) 20:49, 28 March 2012 (UTC)

Per our ownership policy companies don't own the articles – neither in a legal sense nor in a social sense. --MuZemike 00:22, 30 March 2012 (UTC)

Most articles are created by goodfaith volunteer editors. If you could devise a way to only show such a message to spammers and shills then I'd be a bit more relaxed, but we shouldn't give a spam warning to everyone any more than we should give everyone a vandalism warning. Also with this note there is the risk that some editors would take it literally and think that paid editing is normal..... It could be read as an advert for paid editing. ϢereSpielChequers 22:53, 30 March 2012 (UTC)

I think this is a good point. Besides, if this is implemented, then there's a number of other issues that people will say should be added there too and we'd end up with long lists of directions when new pages are created that no one would bother reading anyways. Silverseren^C 22:57, 30 March 2012 (UTC)

I just don't think it would work. Most paid editors wouldn't "confess" (none of them would more than once), and we'd have ignorant cowboys jumping on them for creating perfectly good articles because our volunteer editors wrongly believed that paid editing was prohibited. Besides, most of our new articles aren't about companies. IMO the pop culture fanboy problem is far more serious, and those are nearly always written by young volunteers. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:42, 31 March 2012 (UTC)

Revoke permissions

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

---

• I withdraw my nomination, I did not read WP:BEANS before. Thanks. Dipankan says.. ^{("Be bold and edit!")} 10:06, 31 March 2012 (UTC)

Hello, I just came up with a idea that why not create a page; to which; by editing takes away all of a user's permission? This is technically possible with the help of a edit filter; simply by creating the filter with syntax: article_prefixedtext == "<PAGE NAME WHICH IS REVOKING PERMISSIONS>"; as article_prefixedtext == "Wikipedia:Don't edit unless you want to give away your permissions." Then all we have to do is tick "Remove the user from all privileged groups" option in the AbuseFilter. This concept has developed in a test wiki. Dipankan says.. ^{("Be bold and edit!")} 05:09, 31 March 2012 (UTC)

• Oppose - totally unneeded and useless. If a user needs permissions revoked, he/she cannot be forced to edit that page.--Jasper Deng (talk) 05:15, 31 March 2012 (UTC)
• I did not say that. I said if a user wants to give up the rights. And not forced. This will reduce the work of admins :-) Dipankan says.. ^{("Be bold and edit!")} 05:40, 31 March 2012 (UTC)
  • It's a recipe for accidents. Besides, often only some of the groups should be dropped.--Jasper Deng (talk) 05:43, 31 March 2012 (UTC)
• Oppose per WP:BEANS →Στc. 06:54, 31 March 2012 (UTC)
• Strong Oppose What kind of proposal is this anyway? If he or she doesn't want the right anymore, he/she can always request that they be removed. Not only is this proposal full of beans, it also appears to be a solution in search of a problem. Even if it wanted to solve a problem, it's the wrong way to solve it. Narutolovehinata5 ^tccsdnew 07:01, 31 March 2012 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

return to mobile

Typing on my sevan inch resistive screen aboard a bus halfway from Nyc to Pittsburgh. Naturally it opens on the mobile view which is best for reading. Mobile cant see my watchlist or edit and theres a button to see the normal format for that. That often leads me to a page I want to read but there's no button to go right to the mobile version of what I'm looking at. I could insert a .m. in the url but its very clumsy with this hardware. Can there be an option for this? Jim.henderson (talk) 17:19, 30 March 2012 (UTC)

There's a link to "Mobile view" on the footer of every page (on the normal version of the site) that leads to the mobile version of the page you're on. I believe that link only displays on pages that the mobile version supports, which basically excludes Special: pages. I could be wrong on that last point. Killiondude (talk) 17:34, 30 March 2012 (UTC)

Ah. Typing now on my Win7 10 inch netbook, having found a table in a lobby with free wifi. Yes, the 7 inch screen and cramped quarters on the bus distracted me from seeing the view change button. I'll be using it tomorrow on the bus back to New York. Meanwhile, testing the mobile/desk transition with the Windozer made me stumble upon mobile versions of my Watchlist and this talk page. Their usefulness is impaired; for example the mobile version talk page lacks a TOC but still I can clearly see that my little Android tablet will become more useful when I study more how to take full advantage of the ability to switch views. And perhaps our industrious software development people will add handy new features to the mobile view this year and smooth out the old ones. Thanks. Jim.henderson (talk) 12:36, 1 April 2012 (UTC)

The position of the "insert" helper box on the edit screen

You know it sure would be helpful if on the edit screen the box containing the "Insert" functionality were located directly below the input box. Right now I have to pause in my edits, scroll down a page, click on the insert character I want to add, then scroll back up. This is inefficient. Is there a way to re-arrange things? Thank you. Regards, RJH (talk) 19:36, 31 March 2012 (UTC)

Do you have two scroll bars like I do? One for the edit space and one for the browser. It seems like a good plan to move that whole edit bar to the top, but I don't what it would take, and how high the priority would be.--Canoe1967 (talk) 21:26, 31 March 2012 (UTC)

Yes that's it exactly. Regards, RJH (talk) 23:33, 1 April 2012 (UTC)

Proposal, require all new article to go through Articles for creation

Backfired April Fool's joke. Nothing to see here. T. Canens (talk) 15:14, 2 April 2012 (UTC)
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.
I propose that the ability to create pages in article space be restricted to admins (and perhaps a "creators" group) and that all new articles be required to go through articles for creation. Also, AFC should be redesigned to work just like articles for deletion. Here are the details... If someone wishes to create a new article then he first should create a userspace draft. He would then "nominate it for creation" by creating Wikipedia:Articles for creation/Articlename. This would include a nomination statement that should provide any supersources that the nominator believes establishes the subject's notability. He then transcludes the discussion on the daily log page. The discussion, like AFD, will run for 7 days with editors !voting Support or Oppose and giving their rationales. At the end of the 7 days a closing administrator will close (or relist) the discussion and then move, or not move, the userspace draft to article space. I think this proposal will lighten the load on our overburdened deletion processes by preventing crap articles from being created in the first place and eliminate the need for new page pouncenew page patrol thereby freeing up editors to do more important things like improving our existing Transformers and Dr Who articles. --Ron Ritzman (talk) 02:25, 1 April 2012 (UTC) Strong oppose (unless it's April Fool's) - I might support requiring autoconfirmed status to do this, but this'll be extra load to admins (replacing CSDs, etc., which can also be in the talk namespace; it'll come from both granting the right and closing the creation discussions), and an unnecessary use of other editors' time making another !vote.--Jasper Deng (talk) 02:29, 1 April 2012 (UTC) Comment See WP:ACTRIAL and the Foundation's response. Anomie⚔ 02:35, 1 April 2012 (UTC) Very strongly oppose ...as one who's created less than a handful of articles himself (one of which has since been deleted), but who's built up or helped build dozens from stubs. Lots of help and unthreatening guidance is fine, but don't deter readers from becoming editors this way. There are many paths to working on Wikipedia, and this is an avenue where we shouldn't throw extra barriers or boulders in the absence of a particularly severe specific problem, such as WP:BLP's or a few WP:Arbitration Committee-designated areas of violent contention. Few people (especially new editors) will go to all that trouble just to create a bare stub (either de novo or to fill in a red link); but those bare stubs or stumps are what most real articles grow from. And if you don't think we can use more editors and more stubs (or one-paragraph beginning entries), look at the red links in any list you might consider significant. —— Shakescene (talk) 02:49, 1 April 2012 (UTC) Strong oppose There is a big backlog at AFC, currently. Now if we require all articles to go through AFC, 70% of the articles won't get created. Furthermore, creating a "creator" group will make the workload go even more higher, thus users will leave one by one; and articles will stop from getting created. Dipankan says.. ("Be bold and edit!") 04:50, 1 April 2012 (UTC) Personally, I think we should just save ourselves the trouble and send them all to Articles for Deletion instead.  ;) Resolute 04:55, 1 April 2012 (UTC) Oppose I don't think we should force all created articles to go through this process. I do think, however that we should make the default setting to making an article (the thing that most newbies will do because it is the easiest way to do it) should be to go through the Article Wizard. There was a brilliant idea to simply have a Create Page tab on the contents section on the left, and have it redirect to Article Wizard. This way, we can still do what we do, but new editors will just do it that way, and therefore always have to go through the AW. Sounds like an awesome compromise IMO.--Coin945 (talk) 06:06, 1 April 2012 (UTC) Comment; we crackheads are, according to the WMF's official spokesperson, too retarded to run our own project anyways. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 06:57, 1 April 2012 (UTC) The foundation didn't go for limiting to autoconfirmed; no way this will go over. --Rschen7754 07:17, 1 April 2012 (UTC) Oppose Because it doesn't fit the reality of Wikipedia. If I want to create a new article for a parliamentary constituency which is formed through the Sixth Periodic Review of Westminster constituencies, it's a very different proposal than creating an article about the next big boy band sensation or a new release computer game. I understand the frustrations. One size fits all won't work. doktorb wordsdeeds 07:43, 1 April 2012 (UTC) Oppose. because that would just suck, it's unnecessarily bureaucratic. I do like WP:AACT, as everyone else does; but since that got shut down at the 11th hour, this has no shot and should probably be closed. Unfair joke. Punchline came at the end, when it should be reasonably assumed that I would only read the first sentence before forming and posting an opinion. Also assumes Transformers and Dr. Who are relatively unimportant in the grand scheme of an encyclopedia, when clearly they only come second to The Simpsons. Equazcion (talk) 07:56, 1 Apr 2012 (UTC) Oppose for same reason as User:Rschen7754 and others. Mugginsx (talk) 08:11, 1 April 2012 (UTC) Comment – Maybe we should do that with Articles for creationism? Regards, RJH (talk) 23:35, 1 April 2012 (UTC) Oppose I never would have had any of my articles created under this rule/process, also this would put to much work/pressure on admins, and lastly there is already enough processes to wiki. icetea8 (talk) 13:09, 2 April 2012 (UTC) Oppose this would be even worse than the ACTRIAL process - at least that was limited to non-autoconfirmed editors. The idea that even people with the Autopatrolled userright would need someone else to move their new articles into mainspace seems to me a time consuming bureaucratic complication. We should be trying to make it easier for our content contributors not the reverse. ϢereSpielChequers 14:26, 2 April 2012 (UTC) Oppose - Sorry but this is a nonstarter proposal. This makes the burden way too high for new editors. Shadowjams (talk) 15:03, 2 April 2012 (UTC) Strongest possible oppose One of the most bureacratic and offensive proposals to the concept of building a free encyclopedia I've ever seen. Glad to see similar reactions here. Editors should be free to create whatever new content they want. Sources determine this and those which don't meet guidelines would likely be deleted. Ron is right though that a lot of crap gets created but I don't think this is the right solution. The policies on content should be stricter towards fan cruft stuff but as long as the fans like it we'll continue having articles about low league football seasons and lists of Pokemon.♦ Dr. Blofeld 15:05, 2 April 2012 (UTC)

Contribute what you know or are willing to learn more about, article

• Wikipedia:Contribute what you know or are willing to learn more about, article needs work. icetea8 (talk) 13:14, 2 April 2012 (UTC)

Please stop re-editing new article page guidelines until proper consensus has been reached

No actual proposal. Better taken to the article Talk page(s). — The Hand That Feeds You:Bite 14:25, 3 April 2012 (UTC)
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.
http://en.wiki.x.io/wiki/Wikipedia:How_to_create_a_Wikipedia_article has now been re-directed to: Wikipedia:Starting an article by User talk:Jimbo Wales himself. The prior page: How to create an article had become so full of mixed messages and tags that even an experienced editor (not to mention the Founder) could not understand it. Thank you. Mugginsx (talk) 13:22, 31 March 2012 (UTC) I don't understand your concern. All Jimbo did was redirect Wikipedia:How to create a Wikipedia article a page that had been been marked historical since 22:17, 19 May 2009 to Wikipedia:Your first article the current page on how to create a new page. It doesn't look like that page has had a lot of edits that are confusing anyone. It doesn't look like Wikipedia:How to create a Wikipedia article was confusing anyone except if a new editor went there and try to follow those historical directions. GB fan 17:28, 31 March 2012 (UTC) Read it again. The article had the information which I posted on JW page. He agreed it was confusing and redirected it himself. You are NOW looking at the article that it redirected to not the article I was describing and that he looked at. Mugginsx (talk) 19:12, 31 March 2012 (UTC) You didn't edit Wikipedia:Starting an article, and it still has all its contents. You didn't edit Wikipedia:How to create a Wikipedia article. Nobody touched that page for almost two years before Jimbo redirected it. So what's your actual complaint? Which page did you edit? WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:20, 31 March 2012 (UTC) This is why I avoid Village Pump whenever possible. I did not edit ANY article. Mugginsx (talk) 19:30, 31 March 2012 (UTC) Ah, I see. You edited Wikipedia:Your first article, to tell people to stop editing a page that nobody was editing anyway. The last non-vandalism change to that page was over a month ago, and was a change explicitly discussed on the talk page. I'll be removing your useless warning per WP:Instruction creep. We do not tell people not to do something when nobody's doing it anyway. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:28, 31 March 2012 (UTC) You are still looking at the wrong article. I edited NOTHING. Do as you wish. Take it up with Jimmy Wales for any further questions. You do not seem to know what you are talking about and I do not care to interact with argumentative editors. Mugginsx (talk) 19:37, 31 March 2012 (UTC)

A new tack

I made two samples that may be used as alternates for delete templates.

• Template samples

They would still categorize the article in the delete discussion page, but under two sections that could be added. One for format errors and the other for content errors. Then NPP would have a choice of tags and prioritize the deletions to 3 types. They could deal with the obvious first(Type One - spam, BLP, etc.) and thus allow more time for viable articles lacking references or good format to stay for copyedits. If the creator another or editor comes across a delete template, they could replace it with one of these and thus not scare new editors. Feel free to edit my templates.--Canoe1967 (talk) 16:37, 31 March 2012 (UTC)

• Approve. I like it.

Thank you. I just added Template:New page that was proposed and failed from lack of interest it seems.--Canoe1967 (talk) 21:19, 31 March 2012 (UTC)

When and where would these templates be used? We have no deletion discussions for "format errors" and "content errors". Yoenit (talk) 15:06, 3 April 2012 (UTC)

Feature request: Toggle all images

Per NOTCENSORED, Wikipedia articles will always contain images that are NFSW (or more to the point, Not Safe For Public Transit).

A few people know how to browse without images, but most people don't even know it's possible. Attempts to explain it to them have generally failed-- too many browsers, too many OSes, and too many native languages. New readers have no idea how to read Wikipedia without images.

The solution is to add an "Image Toggle" button the User Interface. When clicked, it would temporarily disable the images on the page. Each image would be replaced with an offer to "Show All Images". Re-showing all images should be near-instantaneous.

This was originally proposed at an ongoing RFC. A proof-of-concept javascript has been created, you can view example screenshots.

There's appears to be substantial support for adding such a button to the Muhammad article. There is also substantial opposition-- opposers cite a need to treat all articles equally under NPOV/NOTCENSORED. But even among people who oppose adding Image Toggle to one specific article (Muhammad), there seems to be a lot of support for adding the feature to the main Wikipedia user interface, as a feature available on all articles (since we don't want to single any one article out as 'special' or 'controversial').

We know our tech-saavy users routinely browse without images during public browsing. We should let all users have that same ability. would there be support for such a UI tweak? HectorMoffet (talk) 08:46, 23 March 2012 (UTC)

Perhaps wait for that discussion to come to an end first? It doesn't have much chance if it fails there and really I wouldn't want that discussion spilling over to here before it is finished. Dmcq (talk) 11:33, 23 March 2012 (UTC)

Actually, this should be less controversial than adding it just to a single article. I believe it will fail as an article-specific hatnote, but will succeed when applied to all articles. --HectorMoffet (talk) 23:00, 23 March 2012 (UTC)

We could also wait until image filtering is implemented. —  HELLKNOWZ  ▎TALK 11:55, 23 March 2012 (UTC)

I'm glad to see the baseline support there, I thought I was in a minority with the way I got almost universal opposition elsewhere when discussing anything like that. Dmcq (talk) 13:08, 23 March 2012 (UTC)

If I understand things, the image filter is not under active development, I assume because it was too controversial / dev intensive. "Image Toggle" would be far less controversial than Image Filter, because it would be content neutral-- all images on an article treated identically, all articles treated identically. --HectorMoffet (talk) 23:09, 23 March 2012 (UTC)

Just to clarify: the image filter is not under active development, that's correct, but not for the reasons you cite. It was clear that the category based implementation was flawed, and that it needed to be rethought. The Board and Sue are still talking through it, and I know there have been some excellent alternative proposals from the community that I assume are part of the consideration there. Philippe Beaudette, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 15:30, 28 March 2012 (UTC)

Support though this might not be the most relevant forum. It's a pleasant and easy feature in Wikipedia:Mobile access where it serves to restrict the number of kilobytes that must be downloaded to see a page, but if a reader prefers to use it to censor, no problem. Jim.henderson (talk) 14:36, 23 March 2012 (UTC)

• "There seems to be substantial support to adding such a button to the Muhammad article" is a decidedly misleading statement. As of right now, support is well below 40% and barring a major change in opinion, that proposal is doomed to failure. However, I am one of the opposers who sees this as a potentially useful widget that could be added to the sidebar toolbox, but only on two conditions: First, that it applies to all articles, not just the ones that are subjectively considered controversial. Second, that the default state is all images shown. Any option other than that would be fiercely condemned as a censorship position. Resolute 20:35, 23 March 2012 (UTC)

+1 to everything Resolute said, especially his characterization of RFC. There is "substantial support" but there is no consensus for adding the feature to just one article. I don't anticipate that will change. --HectorMoffet (talk) 23:02, 23 March 2012 (UTC)

Firmly agree. No-images should not be based on what editors think might cause controversy or objections but would just be a technical tool which can be used for various purposes. JHS_nl (talk) 07:52, 29 March 2012 (UTC)

• Support. A proposal to add this feature to a single article should rightfully be DOA, but it would be quite useful to include an image toggle on Wikipedia as a whole. This is useful not only to avoid seeing images one might find objectionable, but also to speed up page-load times for slow connections, or for connections with monthly data limits. Even with my fast connection, I'd like to see a user setting (for when I'm logged in of course) to turn off images by default, with a toggle available on every page to turn them on when I want. It might be cool if there was some memory of which pages I've enabled images, but it doesn't need to be on a per-page basis, it's enough to toggle them on or off at will regardless of the page I'm on. 66.159.220.134 (talk) 22:06, 5 April 2012 (UTC)

WikiProject Ads

I have a new, simple, and quick way that the Wikimedia Foundation can earn money - allowing ads for WikiProjects on pages relevant to them. The money will not be earned through the Foundation itself putting up ads or hosting advertisements from private companies. Each WikiProject which meets basic requirements for activity and reasonable should be guaranteed 2 user-hours of advertisement time per article, with all advertisements being checked in order to ensure that they are:

• Not disruptive to the readers of the encyclopedia.
• Not commercial in nature.
• Do not take up excess space on the page.
• Are easy to load by even older computers.

This has several advantages over the current personal appeals from Jimmy Wales, because it does not seem like Wikipedia is advertising itself. Furthermore, it is making the Wikimedia Foundation more accountable to its community, ensuring that its decisions are ultimately more beneficial to it.

The rates for additional hours will be computed using the following formula:

y = sqrt(0.10x)

Where x= the number of additional articles, and y equals the total cost.

Advertisements will only be permitted in article namespace. Wer900 ^talk_{essay on the definition of consensus} 03:43, 30 March 2012 (UTC)

• Oppose as it's a perennial proposal and has been opposed before. There are already Wikipedia ads for WikiProjects available. In the future, please sign your tildes (using ~~~~). Regards, Whenaxis (contribs) ^{DR goes to Wikimania!} 23:02, 29 March 2012 (UTC)

I want a Wikipedia without ads, plain and simple, and so do nearly all other contributors (I assume). Interchangeable|talk to me 23:54, 29 March 2012 (UTC)

These ads are going to be permitted for individual WikiProjects. The perennial proposal you showed me had to do with ads from anyone. These are community-generated ads that I am talking about, nothing like Google Ads, as the perennial proposals page discusses. And what are the personal appeals from Jimmy Wales other than advertisements for the Wikimedia Foundation?Wer900 ^talk_{essay on the definition of consensus} 03:43, 30 March 2012 (UTC)

What the... where the heck did the square root come from? lol
— V = IR (Talk • Contribs) 04:10, 30 March 2012 (UTC)

It just looks like an arbitrary scaling function to provide reduced cost per article for those who spam a lot of articles. It could just as easily be the logarithmic function. The 0.1 also looks like an arbitrary scaling constant. Personally I wouldn't mind advertizing as long as it was purely voluntary. I.e. you would agree to ads because by doing so you are "donating" money to the foundation. Maybe you would also not have to read the volunteer drive notices. Regards, RJH (talk) 17:33, 30 March 2012 (UTC)

How is it possible to have an advertisement that is "not commercial in nature"? Interchangeable|talk to me 20:58, 30 March 2012 (UTC)

I'm not sure you are clear on the concept of Wikiprojects. They are not commercial at all, and any contributor can found one. They do not pay money to the Foundation to be hosted. Many Wikiprojects do have some templates that can be used on Userpages to advertise the project to other users, but moving those to the article namespace? That would just invite trolls to vandalize Wikiprojects, and probably more (though I can't think of anything else). Interchangeable|talk to me 21:04, 30 March 2012 (UTC)

Possibly ads for volunteer organizations? Government messages? Regards, RJH (talk) 21:05, 30 March 2012 (UTC)

To whom are you responding? Additionally, what will happen when advertisers suddenly see that Wikipedia is allowing advertisements in some form? This might open the floodgates. Interchangeable|talk to me 21:10, 30 March 2012 (UTC)

Looking at the indentation and the comment it would seem a pretty clear riposte to your comment "How is it possible to have an advertisement that is "not commercial in nature"?". In the US non-commercial advertising is pretty big, the Politicians alone spend far more than our annual budget. I'd be even more uncomfortable with that than I would be with commercial advertising, whereas Government road safety ads would be less offensive to me than commercial advertising. ϢereSpielChequers 12:52, 31 March 2012 (UTC)

Nevertheless, we are at least in agreement that advertisements, whether commercial or non-commercial, are detrimental to the project. Interchangeable|talk to me 19:55, 31 March 2012 (UTC)

• Advertising proposals are neither new nor simple. Some of the objections that they need to counter include:

1. Why switch from a spectacularly successful fundraising method that raises more money than we need and is improving every year to a high risk controversial proposal?
2. The last time Advertising was seriously considered it provoked the most serious split in the community's history. Actually implementing it would almost certainly split the community with a strong likelihood that the "advertising free" fork would be the more successful.
3. On a neutral encyclopaedia how do you implement advertising while still being perceived as neutral? Remembering that whichever car manufacturer had their ad on the page Fuel economy in automobiles the other manufacturers would be watching to see if they had undue advantage such as through having pictures of their cars in our articles.
4. All our content is available under an open license, so if a search engine chose to, they could copy all the content except the ads and offer an advertising free version within their search engine. As the search engines earn their money through advertising this would be an obvious thing to do. ϢereSpielChequers 12:52, 31 March 2012 (UTC)

• I think some editors are misreading this - I take it that the Wikiprojects are supposed to be getting noncommercial "ads" (I assume you mean banners?) for themselves. Nonetheless, the WikiProjects already get a huge banner at the top of the pages they watch. Do they really need more awareness? Wnt (talk) 03:23, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

Nobody reads the talk pages except for autoconfirmed Wikipedians like you and I. Wer900 ^talk_{essay on the definition of consensus} 02:46, 5 April 2012 (UTC)

The arguments here seem to be misconstruing the nature of my proposal. My goal is to use the existing ads for WikiProjects, and give each WikiProject a payment platform through which they can pay in order to place their ads at the top of articles. Of course, there could always be a button to stop the ads from displaying. The ads will be created and paid for by individual WikiProjects, and they will have to go through an approval process before being displayed or changed.

1. The ads will not be those of government or any private organizations.
2. WikiProjects and the Wikimedia Foundation are the only ones allowed to advertise with the banners.
3. Ads may not advocate specific views on politics or religion, and extremist ads are forbidden.
4. Ads may not promote products or organizations, whatever these might be.
5. Ads may not be pornographic or otherwise so unambiguously shocking as to cause disruption on the encyclopedia.

Gadget proposal

There seems to be support for adding User:Yair rand/ReferenceTooltips as a gadget at this discussion, but the whole gadget discussion area seems rather dead lately. This script adds rollover popups to inline citations, along with selectable text and clickable URLs, all but eliminating the need to jump away from article text to check references. I've been using it for some time now and haven't noticed any issues (at least in Vector). Can this be implemented as a gadget? Equazcion ^(talk) 17:01, 3 Apr 2012 (UTC)

Implemented it yesterday. Love it. What I've wanted for a while. I like how the popups dont disappear as soon as your mouse leaves the link. It means you can copy the reference etc. I support this proposal. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Coin945 (talk • contribs) 23:46, 3 April 2012‎ (UTC)

Support - Would greatly enhance reader-friendliness.--JayJasper (talk) 05:01, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

• Support I have been using this for quite a while. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 08:38, 4 April 2012 (UTC)
• Support – I love this and use it all the time. —danhash (talk) 14:09, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

I've added it as a gadget into the "Browsing" section. -- WOSlinker (talk) 18:12, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

Great, thanks :) Equazcion ^(talk) 18:56, 4 Apr 2012 (UTC)

• Comment – As long as we can readily turn it off. Popups have an annoying habit of getting in the way. Regards, RJH (talk) 20:48, 5 April 2012 (UTC)
• Support - as it will allow quicer and easier referncing.

Proposal for message for new editors creating new article.

I am sorry, but I am getting a little tired of hearing about the problems of the new page patrollers. I know they have a hard job but that is OUR fault, not the fault of the new editor OR the new page patrollers. There is a SIMPLE solution to this. I mentioned it yesterday. When a new editor creates an article, a bot could post the following message it over the article the way the Speedy Delete notice now goes stating:

I see you are a new editor and have created an article. This article is not yet sufficient to meet Wikipedia Standards yet so please start it in your Wikipedia:Sandbox and study Wikipedia:Starting an article. Thankyou and welcome to Wikipedia.

What is so hard about that? Mugginsx (talk) 14:44, 28 March 2012 (UTC) Instead we have created a hostile environment for new editors where the first thing they see is the Speedy Delete banner. It does not make sense.

• Agree. Mugginsx (talk) 16:46, 28 March 2012 (UTC)

*Oppose the idea: if new editors are encouraged to start articles on topics they know nothing about, we will get the sort of dreadful stub/article which consists of a series of random facts or sentences paraphrased from Google and Google books hits, loosely strung together in some sort of half-baked prose, leaving the reader no better off than if they had done the Google search themselves and causing a lot of cleanup work by other editors to protect the encyclopedia from such low-quality articles. Much better to encourage new editors to work on improving existing articles, as suggested above. PamD 16:14, 28 March 2012 (UTC) Striking this out, will replace it above, because a new heading has been added since I wrote it. I was opposing the general "100 articles" suggestion, not the "message to new editors". PamD 17:05, 28 March 2012 (UTC)

::You don't know that will happen at all. It is pure speculation and it is insulting to a group of people you do not even know. It would help the new page patrollers immensely in my view. Mugginsx (talk) 16:41, 28 March 2012 (UTC))

I think think the quickest way to swim is to jump in at the deep end.

What I'd like to see when a new page is created, is a message: Click here if you have created this under contract with the company that has employed you to create the article. then automatically add to it. Category: Article written or edited under contract. Some of us are having our time wasted in dealing with with non-notable paid-for-articles.--Aspro (talk) 17:17, 28 March 2012 (UTC)

Comment---I think letting new editors jump in the deep end is a problem that creates the situation we are discussing here. Only a few newbies learn how to stay afloat...let alone swim. Almost all need to be saved by the Lifeguards (Speedy Deletion Team) and I would bet that most never go near the water again. Speedy Deletion can be a heart-breaking experience for the fragile new editor. They need some floatation devices and instructions. As soon as they learn to stay above water, move their feet abit, dog-paddle to safety; then they are hooked. The Australian Crawl is just a few lessons away. Then we will an active participating member of the Community. ```Buster Seven Talk 20:39, 6 April 2012 (UTC)

(:::This could be moved to a new proposal which editors can vote on but it does not belong here. Mugginsx (talk) 17:21, 28 March 2012 (UTC)

• Comment Would it not be possible to make a widget that watches new accounts, and when they go to start their first article (and until they submit it), have a message appear in the editnotice space? This message could link to the must-know policies/rules for creating articles, it could mention that articles may be deleted quickly if they don't meet a minimum quality guideline (something I'd like to see as well, set a threshold for quality of stubs beyond just the notability of the topic), but not to take it personally as different people find different things to be important in their own way. - ʄɭoʏɗiaɲ ^τ _¢ 17:25, 28 March 2012 (UTC)

I personally do not know much about programming. The concept sounds good but I think my proposal would be simplier and would actually help the immense problem that new page patrollers state they have. Mugginsx (talk) 17:33, 28 March 2012 (UTC)

Your proposal isn't exactly clear where you want this message. Does it display as they're creating an article? As Floydian points out, that would require a coding change for this to work. It's not something we can implement here. You'd probably be better off posting a feature request.

If you mean, a bot posts to their Talk page when they make a new article, I suppose it could be done, but your message is pretty presumptive ("This article is not yet sufficient"). I'm just not sure how this will help— The Hand That Feeds You:^Bite 17:38, 28 March 2012 (UTC)

Yes, a bot could post it over the article the way the Speedy Delete notice now goes. I thought saying "not yet sufficinet" would be better sounding than the first notice that they see being a Speedy Delete notice. Have you seen them? It is enough to put off a new editor in my opinion. Mugginsx (talk) 17:48, 28 March 2012 (UTC)

Splashing their new page with your notice saying it is not sufficient is off-putting as well. Moreso in my opinion, because it's automated. Their article might be perfectly compliant, but the bot wouldn't know. — The Hand That Feeds You:^Bite 18:24, 28 March 2012 (UTC)

• So, we're actually working on something like this :). If you look at mw:Article Creation Workflow/Landing System, you'll see that new users presented with the option to create an article will be directed to various drafting or wizard-based options, as well as given tooltips of what should be expected of them. We are hoping this will cut down on junk and improve the overall quality of submissions by ensuring newbies are better-informed before hitting "save". If you've got any questions, suggestions or hints, feel free to drop them to me on my talkpage or in reply to this thread :). Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 18:16, 28 March 2012 (UTC)

These templates are definitely a step in the right direction insofar as they are friendly and offer a "simple" set of choices. They also give the new editor the benefit of the doubt. However, what I am proposing here is a narrower solution to the two BIG problems in Wikipedia that are frequently being discussed at Jimbo Wales page and elsewhere:

• Wikipedia is losing editors and the rate of new editors is going down drastically.
• New and newish editors are creating articles that are, for one reason or another not yet ready.

I believe this is the solution TO BOTH and the way to cut down on the work of the new page patrollers. Mugginsx (talk) 18:35, 28 March 2012 (UTC)

Well, the problems and solutions to them are a lot more nuanced than that. But can you explain how your proposal offers more options than the Landing Pages project? I mean, the one big distinction I can see is that yours would be after the fact rather than before. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 19:05, 28 March 2012 (UTC)

Which is why I think your proposal is the better one. Best to avoid the problem than have to deal with it after the event. Malleus Fatuorum 23:40, 28 March 2012 (UTC)

This is an article recently created by a novice user. It is in the category 'Articles created by novice users'. Although it is in main article space it is open to discussion on the talk pages of the article and creator. The information contained in it may not meet wikipedia standards, such as REF, NOT, COI and POV; therefore it yet may be moved to user space or deleted.

This, or similar, could be set as a new template and category that is put up my new article patrollers, or used to replace the speedy delete template put up by another editor? I don't think we need a bot to patrol.--Canoe1967 (talk) 19:53, 28 March 2012 (UTC)

I like it. Certainly friendlier and better than the first thing someone seeing is a Speedy Deletion tag but I thought that the idea was to get everyone to begin an article in their Sandbox? Mugginsx (talk) 20:09, 28 March 2012 (UTC)

Again; both of these overlap with mw:Article Creation Workflow/Landing System. I'd be grateful if people would either comment on that system or explain what differentiates templates like this from the general principle of what we're already talking about :). Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 20:14, 28 March 2012 (UTC)

WMF, that does look like a good plan. I think others here are discussing an alternate tag to the speedy delete one. Some editors may just create an article without using your method. A new template and category for these articles may not scare them as much as the existing one.--Canoe1967 (talk) 20:27, 28 March 2012 (UTC)

That...would be impressive :). When the project is fully deployed, there won't be a way for a new user to create an article without initially going through this pane. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 23:25, 28 March 2012 (UTC)

I do not know how long this project has been in place but the problems of losing editors and those numbers not being replaceed by new editors is still with us. When someone becomes an editor it is with the idea of creating an article. If that is squashed like a bug the first attempt an editor makes, it tends to make him or her want to quit. Most people do not join Wikipedia to edit other articles, though there a great satisfaction in improving an article, it is not their first thought. That is why I think this particular area is so sensitive and needs some sensitivity. Templates, though fine and certainly needed are too impersonal, in my opinion, for this one, particular area - creating one's first article. Mugginsx (talk) 20:26, 28 March 2012 (UTC)

Template:New page I just came across this template. It could be used to replace the speedy delete ones, unless we decide on a new template? Mugginsx, we could add a note under the template and/or on the user talk page to include 'sensitivity'?--Canoe1967 (talk) 21:51, 28 March 2012 (UTC)

(note) It also seems this has been discussed before. Wikipedia:Deletion of newly created pages, Wikipedia talk:Deletion of newly created pages, Wikipedia talk:Deletion of pages under construction and probably a few more.--Canoe1967 (talk) 22:10, 28 March 2012 (UTC)

Wow. Jimmy "Jimbo" Wales could have found this template useful when he created Mzoli's which got deleted only 20 minutes later. [1]. Does he know about it?--Aspro (talk) 23:44, 28 March 2012 (UTC)

Would the 'landing page' idea prevent articles created from search though? If you search 'My famous cat' wikipedia says the article doesn't exist, but you may create one from just clicking the red link. Would this be option be removed if the landing page is used?--Canoe1967 (talk) 23:52, 28 March 2012 (UTC)

• It isn't clear to me what you are trying to propose here, but from what I understand it seems like an bad idea. I would support an attempt to rewrite the speedy deletion templates and user warnings to be more userfriendly, but only if the important information is preserved (reason for deletion, relevant guideline, contesting process). What I see above are just messages which are supposed to be "nice", but lack any information why an article is speedy deleted and what the new editor can do about it. Yoenit (talk) 12:34, 29 March 2012 (UTC)
• As well as Yoenit's point that this proposal is more bitey than the current one I'd also point out that encouraging the use of sandboxes is itself a bad idea. Articles belong in mainspace where collaborative editing takes place. If experienced users want to start things in Sandboxes that's sad but acceptable, but promoting this as an alternative to deletion will result in shedloads of new articles being rejected by being moved to sandboxes, and as the rejection process usually loses us the editor they will just sit there in userspace - on the Internet and often containing stuff that we shouldn't have on our site. There is also the problem we have with uberdeletionists at New page patrol. The Speedy deletion criteria are deliberately tight and constantly being stretched by overly deletionist editors who want to speedy anything which would probably be deleted at AFD or which needs cleanup before being ready for mainspace. A dispensation to sandbox any allegedly imperfect new article risks shifting the whole process of the wiki from collaborative editing to a rejection process. ϢereSpielChequers 07:51, 30 March 2012 (UTC)
• Granted. Many new users want to immediately write an article about their semi-famous Aunt Matilda who wrote an almost famous cookbook back in the forties. Without any awareness of the nuances of Wikipedia editing they are "allowed" to add into mainspace the roughest of rough drafts and the result is Speedy. Better they go to Drivers Ed Class, be issued a Learners Permit, and stay off the major hyways until they know how to drive. Now, all they do is cause congestion and unnecessary work. I'm sure that any new editor will understand restrictions that are implemented in order to participate in writing an Encyclopedia. Anyone can edit as long as they know how to edit. ```Buster Seven Talk 14:56, 6 April 2012 (UTC)

Signature linkage

As we all know, the default signature before people make it all fancy in Special:Preferences is [[User:Example|Example]] ([[User talk:Example|talk]]), which produces Example (talk). So why isn't it [[User:Example|]] ([[User talk:Example|talk]])? The pipe at the end of the link takes away everything before and including the colon. It would actually save quite a lot of space in the long run. I propose the default is changed. Rcsprinter (speak) 21:05, 6 April 2012 (UTC)

It would save no space at all, because [[User:Example|]] is automatically changed to [[User:Example|Example]] before the page is saved, just as ~~~~ is changed to your sig before the page is saved. Try it yourself. Anomie⚔ 21:28, 6 April 2012 (UTC)

Also note that it would not be quite the same for users with commas or "disambiguators" in their username: [[User:Example, the best|]] becomes [[User:Example, the best|Example]], and [[User:Example (the best)|]] becomes [[User:Example (the best)|Example]]. Anomie⚔ 21:34, 6 April 2012 (UTC)

100 New Articles - Feature of Main Page

Proposal - New feature on main page like DYK or OND. 100 "articles of the week" for newbies to create. Maybe 50 to create and 50 to improve.

A discussion on Jimbo's talk page about editor apathy has just got me thinking..... the new editor situation is at critical level at the moment. People just assume that all the good ideas have already been taken, and that there's no point to edit anymore - it's too hard. Not to mention the harsh treatment that many new editors are given, driving them away. Well, what if we have a feature on the main page - right there so visitors see it straight away - which invites people to create the "Top 100 Articles of the Week" - or something like that. Haven't thought out the specifics yet. I just think that by having a discrete list of notable articles in a clear, interesting format (maybe a small engaging explanation of each article concept) would be a really great idea to solve this problem. E.g. "My name is Joe Bloggs. I was a revolutionary in the French Revolution. I wasn't very popular in my day but people now think I'm pretty influential. You can find relevant sites at __________ and _______ etc". Maybe that's a bit too informal. Maybe just: "He was a ___, he did ____, there is much criticism over ______ etc." - like a short snappy pitch to an onlooker for why they would be inspired to create the article. That way, we can be assured that a steady amount of article are being produced very so often. "100" and "week" can obviously be changed. So I think it would probably appear somewhere on the main page - maybe at the top, and list the first few entries, then say: "click here to see the rest of the bunch, just waiting for you to give them a page of their own".... or something like that. Not sure how we'd pick the 100 articles.. probably just grab a few from the Wikipedia:Requested articles or Wikipedia:WikiProject Missing encyclopedic articles pages. We can have like "Movie Weeks" and "Nature Weeks" where the articles are dedicated to a certain topic. Might be quite fun actually. Bring the excitement and enjoyment back to the project. If for no other reason, it might make the vandalism concentrated to a small amount of articles (I assume that usually a lot more than 100 articles get vandalized every week), which will make it more easily monitorable. Any thoughts?--Coin945 (talk) 17:38, 27 March 2012 (UTC)

• Addendum: I think also another reason why this would be a great idea is because it would channel the flow of new article creation into notable topics rather than just throwing articles against a wall and seeing what sticks (a real bitch for those overworked underpaid people at Special:NewPages).--Coin945 (talk) 18:50, 27 March 2012 (UTC)
• Addendum 2: Another reason I think this is a good idea is that, contrary to what people might think, newcomers on the whole really have no idea about what hidden horrors lurk beyond the mainspace, and quite frankly, I would assume that very few actually find out. Even if they did manage to find those endeless lists of pages requesitng articles, they would probably be so overwhelmed by it all - and feel that their contributions will be pointless anyways because nobody else will probably work on their article again because there are so many (I've felt like in the past). Also, they will have no way of knowing with are notable topics and which are not/not bother to find out before making the article.--Coin945 (talk) 02:15, 28 March 2012 (UTC)
• Addendum 3: This will also solve the porblem we have that "new people show up and Wikipedia doesn't really do a good job of suggesting what they could work on".--Coin945 (talk) 08:43, 28 March 2012 (UTC)

Convo #1 - Compliments on idea

• I think this is an exellent idea! Probably the best idea I have ever heard to encourage new articles and new editors, both of which are sorely needed! Congratulations and please keep me informed. Mugginsx (talk) 17:53, 27 March 2012 (UTC)

• Like. Will do :)--Coin945 (talk) 18:22, 27 March 2012 (UTC)

• Good idea I've never bought into the idea that wikipedia was entering a maintenance phase as most topics were already covered. Even with a billion articles, we will have barely scratched the surface of human knowledge. We need people with ideas like this to encourage people to start to create articles. Well done. Wee Curry Monster talk 10:36, 30 March 2012 (UTC)

• Thankyou :) The question is what to do now.. This convo has already become so cluttered I've sectioned out the discussion, but I think that move has deterred people from commenting. Plus in a few day's time, this discussion will be archived..... I think I should make an official proposal page with "support" and "oppose" sections and everything to encourage discussion with a much larger Wikipedia community group, and hopefully get this passed for good....--Coin945 (talk) 12:01, 30 March 2012 (UTC)

Convo #2 - If you have enough info to make a stub, why not just make a stub?

• It's an interesting idea, but if you've got enough info to say, "We should have an article on this, and here's some sites," you've already got enough info to start a stub article... so why not do so, instead of this extra step? — The Hand That Feeds You:^Bite 18:05, 27 March 2012 (UTC)

• The idea is to give new editors a boost. At least that is my take on it. Mugginsx (talk) 18:16, 27 March 2012 (UTC)

• My sentiments exactly :D In response to your question HandThatFeeds, here are my thoughts: Lots of people know the general basic info for a requested article but just can't be stuffed making an article. This way, you pitch the most basic information - "A very important Australia politician" etc. and then provide some links in some form or another, hey presto: you "dump" the work onto someone else (not the best way to put it.. but you get what i mean... :P) who is much more engaged to do the work. Plus, in many of the Wikipedia:Requested articles articles, others have already done the work for you. People leave descriptions to many of the articles that they post there. It's essentially a copy/paste job, with a bit of tweaking to make it more engaging for the general public.--Coin945 (talk) 18:19, 27 March 2012 (UTC)

Convo #3 - Newbies can just use New Page Patrol instead & should start by editing existing articles over creating new ones

• I don't like this idea at all, on many different levels. For starters, anyone who thinks Wikipedia is short of new articles need only spend a few minutes at New Page Patrol to see just how mistaken they are. Malleus Fatuorum 18:27, 27 March 2012 (UTC)
• Added to which, new editors ought not to start by creating new articles, they should start by editing existing ones; the stats seem pretty clear on that being a firmer foundation. Malleus Fatuorum 18:29, 27 March 2012 (UTC)

• With a little help, rather than a "Speedy deletion" notice, new editors can and should start new articles. They can and should be directed with very little effort, and in a more friendly way to begin their article in their sandbox. New editors can and should be encouraged by watch patrol and all others. The speedy deletion box which, admittedly has its purposes, is NOT the way a new editor should be directed. It is too harsh and puts people off. This is not meant to offend any member of the patrol, just a disapproval of starting off with the speedy deletion notice instead of a more personal message. It is doable and Coin945 is on to something very important as our new editors dimish at an astonishing rate. Mugginsx (talk) 18:40, 27 March 2012 (UTC)

• I'm afraid we will have to agree to disagree, as I expect that many others who have spent time at NPP would have to. There's a veritable flood of crap incoming each and every day, take a look for yourself. There simply isn't the manpower to help new editors, for instance, to rewrite the article they copied from a web site, or on the band they just set up with their school mates, or on a girl they fancy. Malleus Fatuorum 18:48, 27 March 2012 (UTC)

• Then re-do the Speedy Deletion template so it does not look so harsh! Word it differently. Something like: You have created a new article but it is not yet sufficient to meet Wikipedia standards, please use Sandbox - make link to "How to create a Sandbox, thank you. Mugginsx (talk) 18:53, 27 March 2012 (UTC)

• Malleus, this way, I think their load will be made a lot lighter through prevention of the problem altogether. As I've added to my original comment above, this proposal channels most of the new editor content into topics that we know for a fact are notable. The whole question of how to respond to new editors making sub-quality non-notable articles should go away, at least to a large extent. I can only see it as a win-win.--Coin945 (talk) 18:55, 27 March 2012 (UTC)

• People write about what interests them. You won't channel a new user into an obscure historical topic when they really just want to write about the band they are in. Also, Mugginsx, I suggest that you go find the Foundation's article creation thingamajig they are working on right now, and also try to talk them out of their policy that overrode a community request to direct newly registered users to WP:AFC. Also, hyperbole like "new editors diminish at an astonishing rate" is not helpful. Resolute 18:59, 27 March 2012 (UTC)

• I personally think that one of the main points of this proposal is that wwe are chosing 100 interesting topics and *making* them interesting to people. We cause these topics to be in the foregorund of people's consciousness as they hop thorugh the site. People probably make articles on silly nonnotable things because besides the obvous topics which have already been taken, the only other things they know are very trivial localised phenomena. By giving them a discrete number of articles in an engaging way, we inspire them to spend their efforts on these articles instead. I really think that we can make these articles (if we do it right) into things our much-appreciated contributors would really get a kick out of doing.--Coin945 (talk) 02:21, 28 March 2012 (UTC)

• Reply to Malleus - I think your missing a key point here in that we are talking about new users or users unfamiliar with Wikipedia's labyrinth of pages. They wouldn't know about the New page patrol, or the dozens of different places where lists of articles to be created reside. This would make the list of articles that need to be created more prominent. Perhaps something along the lines of the DYK process might work for this?

• My sentiments exactly--Coin945 (talk) 02:24, 28 March 2012 (UTC)

• I think it's you that's missing the point. I only mentioned NPP for the benefit of those who seem to be labouring under the illusion that there there is a paucity of new articles, when nothing could be further from the truth. Malleus Fatuorum 20:13, 27 March 2012 (UTC)

Convo #4 - WikiProject Missing encyclopedic articles

• Wikipedia:WikiProject Missing encyclopedic articles may be of interest; lots of links in the infobox on the right side of the page to lists of notable subjects we don't have articles on. 28bytes (talk) 18:56, 27 March 2012 (UTC)

• Excellent! Could we not put this on the new user's page along with the welcome template? I think this would help the patrol as well as fulfill Coins945's purposal of encouraging new editors. Mugginsx (talk) 19:00, 27 March 2012 (UTC)

• Yes! Forgot about those... we can get some awesome articles out of there :)--Coin945 (talk) 02:24, 28 March 2012 (UTC)

Convo #5 - Though this proposal is encouraging a potentially fruitless debate, the concept driving it is fantastic

• I just wanted to say that, while redoing the Main Page in any way is probably asking for a long and potentially fruitless debate, the notion that we should be giving greater acknowledgement to people that write quality new articles is a fantastic one. Systems like GA and FA are already a core part of the project, but they're not the only way to make the encyclopedia better. Let me know if there's anything I can do to help (as a staff person or otherwise). And as for the notion that we don't really want fresh blood to author new articles... well, some people have been around too long and probably need to find a new hobby, one that doesn't involve tromping on the good intentions of others because they've grown cynical. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 01:52, 28 March 2012 (UTC)

• If you're speaking on behalf of the WMF then you might be looking for a new job soon. Malleus Fatuorum 01:57, 28 March 2012 (UTC)

• Hmmm. the question is: where do we go from here... We've got some support but also some criticism. Perhaps it is time to set up a page dedicated solely to this propsal, with sections for those who support and those who do not - for general discussion? I'm not that good with the whole coordination side of it all - I'm just an ideas man (:P), so I'm probably gonna need help in setting that page up, or even working out what people like yourself can do to get this in motion.--Coin945 (talk) 02:28, 28 March 2012 (UTC)

Convo #6 - New users should not be encouraged to start articles. Get them to work on existing articles instead

• As an occasional Huggler, NPPer, ex-Ambassador, and current admin, I wholeheartedly agree with Malleus's points about new users and new articles. New users should not be encouraged to start new articles. A far, far better idea would be some sort of main page section that said, "Hey, here's 100 articles that we've got hanging around that could use some love!" There are numerous pre-existing categories for this: Category:Wikipedia articles needing style editing has almost 12,000 articles in it; and Category:All articles lacking sources has over 235,000! We could, of course, do the same thing suggested above: pick and choose a selected number of these that we think are more "important", and direct people's attention to them. The rationale for pointing new users away from new articles is very simple: notability is an extremely difficult hurdle to overcome, it's not intuitive, and it involves all sorts of, for most people, less than pleasant processes like CSD, AfD, etc. The number of articles we "need" is vastly outnumbered by the number we already have that are barely good enough not to be deleted. Like all businesses, there comes a point where you can't just keep growing by opening new locations--sometimes, you have to step back and work on growing the locations you already have. And regarding Steven's point about needing to reward people for making new articles...don't forget that we already have that, WP:DYK, and many editors have raised some very substantial concerns this last year about how that process works. Luckily, there has been (some) improvement, but that's been because the community turned inward, adding more hurdles to the process, and more regulation, not by encouraging it more. Qwyrxian (talk) 03:36, 28 March 2012 (UTC)

• As most everyone here will know, I'm firmly in agreement with Malleus Fatuorum and Qwyrxian on this issue. Absent the solution we crackheads came up with, New Page Triage (referenced above as the thingmajig) and Article Creation Workflow stand some chance of being helpful to patrollers (and given they were started in September, I'd eagerly encourage people to comment here), but it too doesn't entirely fix the issue. When I talked with a few brand new editors in January, the advice I gave them, contrary to many (though not all) statements by the WMF, was to not try to run head-on into everything; I encouraged them to find a couple articles they found interesting, and gradually build them up in sentences and paragraphs. When they had done that, they could branch out into other articles and our internal processes would come to them, not the other way around; they're much less difficult to handle that way. I also encouraged them to get involved in WP:MILHIST and WP:GOCE, as I've seen many new users have a great experience with those projects. Perhaps we could start welcoming users with a set of articles that need improvement (perhaps something from the GOCE list, although someone probably has a better idea than me) to give them the idea that we want them to edit what we have. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 05:02, 28 March 2012 (UTC)

• In reply to both Blade's and Qwyrxian's suggestions, here are my comments: I think that regardless of what we do, we WILL "keep growing by opening new locations". New articles will constantly be created everyday. Only check out the Special:Newpages page to have sufficient confirmation on that... and as much as the Wikipedia philosophy is changing more to taking a "step back and work on growing the locations you already have", this will not change. This endeavor will channel the new articles into articles that we know for a fact are notable, which is awesome for us. I know that when I first started out, I much preferred making new articles than working on old ones. I still prefer creating new articles. I suspect it's the same for most editors out there. The whole fun of it was to write something simple, something not perfect, and then seeing your work being added to by lots of editors from all around the world - that feeling of being a part of something much bigger is so great - it's an awesome feeling. Working by yourself is horrible... it's like "\I'm going to work my ass off on this page for noone to ever read/edit again because there are so many articles on Wikipedia and mine will just never be seen again". This way, we have all these newbies and oldbies all working together on a bunch of cool articles... and I'm just so convinced this is a great idea. Editors have to start somewhere and instead of being thrown into the depend, give them a chance to grow - to hone on their skills. Back in the past, everyone were learning together. Articles standards were quite bad at Wikipedia's inception, but the standard has slowly but surely grown and grown until it has reached what it is today. But the newbies that come along with this 2005/2006 mentality (in regards to their article quality, collaboration etc) and are suddenly expected to have this high level of writing when the begin, and it scares many people away. It really does. It's just all to much for them - the expectations by more experienced editors, who are seen to be ganging up on them or being condescending, or rude for no apparent reason. You can't expect that from them. Let them be. Let them grow. This way, we can bring back a bit of that flair, and community involvement - that actual COMMUNITY involvement, that I truly think we have tragically lost over time. People don't care about making an article better. That's too hard. It's much easier to create a new article. Little do they know they may in fact end up spending a lot of effort on these new articles, making them to quite a high standard. But if they're forced into the deep-end they may never know what they may have accomplished. Whatever we do, new articles will be made, Why not channel those articles into a discrete number of notable articles "of the week", that these editors know for a fact are being helped to build and grow by others from all over the world - they won't feel so alone and insignificant? This will actually get non-Wikipedians to want to become editors. Something I don't think we've ever been able to successfully accomplish on a grand scale. I'm positive that this will work. 88% at least (:P). At least, it's somewhere to start. Maybe once it's become a feature, you can have the "50 articles to be created" and the "50 articles to be made that little bit better" - to then offer the choice for our newbies to take their editing experience to the next level when they're ready. I just really don't think you guys should be dismissing this so easily. Saying "no" without even really discussing it in great detail seems a bit defeatist..... --Coin945 (talk) 06:56, 28 March 2012 (UTC)

• People don't care about making an article better. That's too hard.
• What? It's much harder to make a standards-compliant article than to do a quick copyedit. I just don't get where you're coming from with this comment. Sure, it's easier to create a new article if you just slap something up without regards for standards. Same thing applies to building a brick wall; both are a bad idea if you don't know what you're doing. — The Hand That Feeds You:^Bite 13:36, 28 March 2012 (UTC)

• Okay, to be perfectly honest, I'm drawing from personal experience on that one... Whether it's actually true or not, that's the way I (and I can guarantee many other newbies) see it. Even if it is easier, and people know it, they may still rather make an article as they're making more of an impact on Wikipedia rather than just doing what they might see as "moving some already written things around in a slightly different order, and changing them slightly".--Coin945 (talk) 21:58, 28 March 2012 (UTC)

• In reply to Blade's suggestion ("Perhaps we could start welcoming users with a set of articles that need improvement...") I just want to say that absolutely yes, we should be experimenting with the many potential kinds of task suggestions. The fact that new people show up and Wikipedia doesn't really do a good job of suggesting what they could work on (this is a software problem and a community problem) isn't helping the situation. As Coin pointed out though, different strokes work for different folks. We all come back again and again here because we get a kick out of different kinds of editing, and suggestions of to-do items that excite one person will bore someone else to death. In any case, I think it's the kind of thing we should and could try more. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 07:24, 28 March 2012 (UTC)

Convo #7 - Proposals such as these are what we need to be investigating, however there is no quick fix

I am glad to see that some serious discussion is occurring here. That is encouraging. I agree that we are not likely to find a perfect solution to any problem immediately. If we advocate new editors creating new articles then that will put more strain on new page patrollers. Eventually though some of these users will continue to contribute if we are patient and help them through the process. I looked through some of the new articles recently and a lot need additional work, some are non notable or just jibberish and shouldn't be here at all, some are quite good. I think its going to require effort to fix/improve some of these. I think there are some good ideas here that if applied could make some improvements to the pedia that will be appreciated and will help encourage new users. Through human intervention and through the usage of bots we can improve the Wikipedia experience which is currently lacking. 138.162.8.57 (talk) 13:20, 28 March 2012 (UTC)

Convo #8 - Bad idea to encourage newbies to write new articles

• Oppose the idea: if new editors are encouraged to start articles on topics they know nothing about, we will get the sort of dreadful stub/article which consists of a series of random facts or sentences paraphrased from Google and Google books hits, loosely strung together in some sort of half-baked prose, leaving the reader no better off than if they had done the Google search themselves and causing a lot of cleanup work by other editors to protect the encyclopedia from such low-quality articles. Much better to encourage new editors to work on improving existing articles, as suggested above. PamD 16:14, 28 March 2012 (UTC) Replacing this contribution here, as it was split off into the section below after I wrote it! PamD 17:08, 28 March 2012 (UTC)

• I don't think anyone is advocating for anyone to create articles about topics unfamiliar too them. IMO this is intended to catch the attention of those who do have an interest in a given topic so they can create an article thats needed that they know about. Potentially, someone could write about something they are unfamiliar with but I doubt this would be common. 138.162.8.58 (talk) 19:18, 28 March 2012 (UTC)

• That's exactly my point. This is a case of engaging our audience, and inspiring them to create new articles, and doing it well. We need to make these topics interesting to people. Learning history at school is really boring for many people, but the Horrible Histories series make it really fun and engaging to children all over the word. Murderous Maths did the same thing for maths, Horrible Science for science...... why can't we do the same thing for our articles? One interesting "short snappy pitch", and I assure you our newbies will be swarming to these articles. Plus, this isn't a case of: "100 newbies create 100 bad articles that need more patrol work". This is: "many editors from around the world all come together to create and work on the '100 articles of the week', have an enjoyable time doing it, and get engaged by the community involvement they otherwise wouldn't have". The quality of articles coming out of this process should be pretty damn high. Something I didn't mention but I thought it went without saying was that once the article has been created, it doesn't actually get removed from the list. It stays until the end of the week. This will encourage editors to build on others' work. Each person may only be bothered to do a bit, but the sum total will create an awesome set of articles - like if they decide on some production line thing, each person does their own little bit but the end result is great. There's no point talking about the hypothetical result of this because we really don't know how they're going to react. I personally think we really should just go ahead give this a shot - a test run, if you will.--Coin945 (talk) 22:06, 28 March 2012 (UTC)

Convo #9 - Small convo on completely different proposal

• Read the Wiki emails, read the Jimbo Wales pages, it is full of the same language. It is not hyperbole. I am not here to argue. I stated this was not "personal" to any person. You should do the same. Mugginsx (talk) 21:10, 27 March 2012 (UTC)

• You're the one who's concerned about the speed deletion template Mugginsx, not me, so why don't you re-do it?" Malleus Fatuorum 18:57, 27 March 2012 (UTC)

• I did, it was just above a few lines. You just weren't listening. Stop making this personal.Mugginsx (talk) 21:10, 27 March 2012 (UTC)

• Don't start down that road Mugginsx, as I can promise that you won't like the destination. You very clearly addressed this comment to me: "Then re-do the Speedy Deletion template so it does not look so harsh!" Malleus Fatuorum 21:21, 27 March 2012 (UTC)

• I made a template mirror if anyone wants to modify it?User:Canoe1967/Template:Db new user--Canoe1967 (talk) 21:35, 27 March 2012 (UTC)

Convo #10 - Other suggestions to help solve the problem

• General comment - I also think that there are a number of other things we could do to help. Here are a couple that I mentioned on Jimbo's page a little while ago:

1. Add a link to the toolbox on the left for Create article (we already have upload file so why not this too) that would link to the Article creation wiz. 138.162.8.57 (talk) 20:03, 27 March 2012 (UTC)

Support--Coin945 (talk) 02:24, 28 March 2012 (UTC)

Support--Mugginsx (talk) 10:54, 28 March 2012 (UTC)

Support Good idea, one of the hurdles to creating articles for newbies is that the user interface is a bit opaque at first. Wee Curry Monster talk 10:32, 30 March 2012 (UTC)

Comment At the moment, the default way to create an article is to type it into the search box and if there is no current page on it, you click "[title] (page does not exist)" to create it, and you go from there. Many people do this without ever knowing about the article wizard (Ive been on wikipedia for about 7 years and i only found out about it 2 years ago when i did some snooping behind the scenes to find out about all the wikiessays and so on and so forth. Would've been very handy when i first started out... Still prefer the searchbar way though.) Doing it this proposed way, the easiest way to create an article is to click the button on the left hand menu, which then takes you do the article wizard. People will by default be creating their articles using that method. The only problem is, we should've implemented this from the very start because now people may suspect that there's something fishy about how they need to make articles now and circumvent it anyway because using the article wizard is like a 6-step process while just making an article takes like 1.--Coin945 (talk) 12:07, 30 March 2012 (UTC)

2. Add a link to the toolbox to the User creation wizard. 138.162.8.57 (talk) 20:03, 27 March 2012 (UTC)

3. Create a new user bot that would welcome new users and perhaps lede them to a WikiProject where they can get some help from others with similar interests (Only active projects of course). 138.162.8.57 (talk) 20:03, 27 March 2012 (UTC)

• Oppose Wikipedia is long past the point where quantity is best. It is already the largest encyclopedia ever assembled. We need lots and lots more quality. And you can look at Wikipedia:Featured Article Candidates to find new quality being produced almost every day, for even the articles that fail are vastly improved by the scrutiny they receive. I would support making WP:FAC easier to find so that even anonymous users can contribute to it, but not giving people an easy opportunity to create content forks and copyright violations. Interchangeable|talk to me 20:57, 30 March 2012 (UTC)
  • Looks like you don't understand that adding new articles do not remove content from high quality ones. emijrp (talk) 09:01, 7 April 2012 (UTC)

• I'd have to agree with that... Just because we are always improving quality (albeit at a relatively slow rate), that doesn't mean we can be content with what we've got. We should always strive to get the project accelerating.--Coin945 (talk) 09:08, 7 April 2012 (UTC)

Convo #11 - We do need lots of new articles, but we should wait until the proposal has been tested and has enough of a following

• Oppose for now. I create new red links all the time - our articles would still be full of them if there weren't a quiet, common, and remarkably well-accepted form of vandalism whereby people take them out because they don't to admit our deficiencies. We need lots of new articles. But what we don't need is to take an untested, unformulated idea for a new article drive straight to the Main Page. If you come up with a fun way for people to sort out the better high-priority new article needs and have fun making them, great, start a WikiProject! And propose it for the Main Page when you've got a hundred people signed up and participating. Wnt (talk) 18:44, 3 April 2012 (UTC)

• Any suggestions on how to get this up and running?--Coin945 (talk) 08:44, 7 April 2012 (UTC)

Give all editors a referencing widget by default

The referencing system of Wikipedia scares me. For ages I had no idea what was going on or how to do it. I thought people did it manually. Maybe they do... but if they do then I have no idea how they do it. Because I didn't understand the more advanced Wikitext, or what one should even include in a reference, I made very bad references for a very long time (all of which I've cleaned up since my widget). Recently, I've been snooping behind the scenes of Wikipedia, accessing all the Wikipedia guideline pages, and Special:Newpages, Villigepump (obviously..... :P), Discussion boards etc... and only about a year ago did I find out how to add a widget (Provelt) that does all the referencing for you - it has things like author, date of publication, URL etc. and blank spaces to be easily filled in, rather than having to fumble around with Wikitext. Can we get it implemented that all editors have access to something like this by default? It is sooo easy to use and will help turn around the problem of new editors being attacked for not knowing how to edit properly. If referencing is too confusing for people, the obvious alternatives are not to reference at all, or to reference really badly. I think this is the solution.--Coin945 (talk) 16:44, 3 April 2012 (UTC)

I think providing something like ProveIt by default is something we could A/B test. There already some helpers in the RefToolbar which is enabled, but newbies probably don't see it that much, so we could also test trying to highlight it when appropriate for new editors. The balance is trying to help folks, but not provide too many tools or documentation when not needed or wanted. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 17:22, 3 April 2012 (UTC)

I've looked at some of those widgets and I find some cumbersome. I disagree with on-by-default, but editors should know that they're available. Shadowjams (talk) 18:51, 3 April 2012 (UTC)

Yes, some are quite large. In any case, a proper test would be for a sample of new editors, not for everyone. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 19:51, 3 April 2012 (UTC)

Figuring out how to do something like this for all editors would be very valuable, and yeah, it'd have to be tested, etc.

(I had a longer digression here, I deleted it, but let me just say that there's a nasty side-effect of (1) not having a good referencing interface for newer editors, (2) allowing those editors to create biographies, and (3) requiring that biographies have sources. That side-effect is that the deletion of those articles results in the loss of a fair number of new editors. I can explain in greater detail elsewhere if you like.)

My soapbox aside, I think finding a way of providing a good referencing interface (ProveIt, RefTools, or something better that can be conjured up) to new users would end up having a signficant positive effect on editor retention, it's not just a matter of polish. As such, I very much appreciate the idea. --joe decker^{talk to me} 05:49, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

No, please, no. ProveIt is too slow to load. The Cite toolbar in Vector does the basics pretty damn well already. —Tom Morris (talk) 13:07, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

I second this, I've abandoned ProveIt for this very reason, and the fact that it doesn't expose all template params. I'm using cite4web now, which needs a bunch of work but makes me less angry. Josh Parris 22:16, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

I use bare URLs: <ref>http://www.boingyboo.com/article</ref>. If I have some specific reason to use the cite template, I do it manually (once you know how to use templates in general it shouldn't be too complicated). As far as I'm aware, there's no policy that says bare URLs are bad. Cite isn't all that great IMO. It bloats up the code and makes editing articles more difficult. Maybe once the WYSIWYG editor is ready (in 2045?) that won't be as much of a problem, but IMO the benefits of cite don't outweigh the pitfall of making each ref a complex bulge of code that interrupts article flow while editing. Equazcion ^(talk) 13:40, 4 Apr 2012 (UTC)

Bare URLs are "bad" because they make it more difficult to fix them when they inevitably rot. Malleus Fatuorum 13:45, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

That may be the least of the problems with them. They represent a huge risk for malware injection, especially on high-visibility pages. We really ought to be automagically vetting every new URL (at the very minimum for known virus threats) before it is added to a mainspace page, particularly those added by anons and new accounts. In the process such a tool could easily log some metadata that would facilitate dead link repair. It could also feed bots that improve citations, counter spam, etc. LeadSongDog come howl! 17:36, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

I'm aware of the reasons the cite template is used, but the cost outweighs the benefits. I think it's more important that prose stay easily editable. My opinion of course. Equazcion ^(talk) 18:54, 4 Apr 2012 (UTC)

Actually, that sounds like you intend something other than wp:Bare URLs, probably wp:Inline citations or wp:ELs? LeadSongDog come howl! 20:01, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

We're talking about two different ways of creating inline citations (not external links). Both methods enclose some text in <ref> tags, producing inline citations (footnotes). The difference of opinion here regards whether inline citations should just contain a URL, or a {{cite}} template that provides additional info (author, title, page number, date published/retrieved, etc). Cite is better in that way, but all that extra info is displayed in the prose of articles while editing, interrupting sentences and paragraphs with lines of code, and that makes editing the content of an article more difficult. Equazcion ^(talk) 20:52, 4 Apr 2012 (UTC)

"All that extra info" doesn't have to be displayed in the prose of articles while editing. That's what List-defined references are about. I highly recommend this technique. Ntsimp (talk) 03:57, 6 April 2012 (UTC)

And Shortened footnotes. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 20:48, 6 April 2012 (UTC)

I've found list-defined references to be life-changing in terms of ease of writing and editing. Why anyone chooses to leave the reference mixed in the text instead of a small tag is a mystery. Bonus: you can mix inline and list-defined so you can transition to the list gradually and painlessly. - Dravecky (talk) 16:52, 7 April 2012 (UTC)

I support the proposal. I have found ProveIt to be quite uselful when citing references, and do not find it any less cumbersome than manually citing the refs (in fact, I find it more expedient). Having this tool - or a similar one - available by default would likely decrease the linkrot problem referenced by Fatuorum & LeadSongDog, as it would provide a step-by-step guide for users unsure of how to format reference tags. At the very least, we could do a better job of letting inexperienced users know the tool is available.--JayJasper (talk) 18:52, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

RefToolbar is enabled and cannot be disabled. ProveIt can be enabled as a gadget. RefToolbar does not support as many Citation Style 1 templates as does ProveIt, and development of RefToolbar seems to have stalled. RefToolbar does have an error check feature that ProveIT does not. For a comparison, see Help:Citation Style 1#Templates. There are also SnipManager and Cite4Wiki, but they have less features. There other tool, listed at Help:Citation tools. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 21:09, 6 April 2012 (UTC)

Old warnings

I believe having a bot or two remove old warnings (2006, 2007, 2008, 2009 etc.) would be extremely helpful. These past weeks, I attempt my best to remove such warnings but the process would be extremely easier with a bot or two. I believe this would also prevent the warnings from seen by different visitors two years or so later. The bot(s) would archive the warnings after 4 to 6 months and tag the article with {{OW}}. SwisterTwister talk 02:15, 7 April 2012 (UTC)

You may be interested in Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/SharedIPArchiveBot_2 Josh Parris 02:28, 7 April 2012 (UTC)

See also: Wikipedia:Bot requests
— V = IR (Talk • Contribs) 02:46, 7 April 2012 (UTC)

And Wikipedia:Village pump (idea lab)#Humble suggestion ([2])... --Martynas Patasius (talk) 09:31, 7 April 2012 (UTC)

Re-propose Autoconfirmed article creation trial

In April 2011, a proposal was put forth to implement, on a trial basis, a requirement that users be autoconfirmed before being able to create new pages [outside their userspace]. The proposal was closed as having consensus for implementation (500 editors participated, with two-thirds supporting implementation). Consensus was subsequently established for a timeframe: A 6-month trial period followed by a 1-month evaluation. The proposal was nevertheless not implemented due to the refusal of individuals at the Wikimedia Foundation, who at the time of the implementation request that resulted from consensus, furnished their own arguments that it was a bad idea.

The rationale for this proposal were:

• New pages patrol is close to unmanageable due to the high volume of article creations.
• About three-quarters of new articles from non-autoconfirmed users are deleted.
• In good-faith cases, having a new article deleted is disheartening to new editors, when (as the theory goes), had they been forced into editing existing articles first, they would have had a better chance at understanding Wikipedia's core policies prior to their first article-creating effort.

Pertinent links:

• Wikipedia:Autoconfirmed article creation trial
• The Bugzilla request for implementation and subsequent responses: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=30208

I've perused the bugzilla request for implementation with some interest, and chose a couple of moments I'd like to share:

• [3]: "...what a lot of new page patrollers seem to miss is this: If the workload is so high, why are you so intent on eliminating the funnel of potential new patrollers [sic]? It's a weird form of self-harm going on here."
  • I'm not sure if this requires any retort, but to share my personal take, I liken it (somewhat; I realize the metaphor isn't perfect) to suggesting that the removal of any bar to entry for aspiring police officers would be a good idea, since some of those will eventually join Internal Affairs, so there will be more people to address the misconduct that is the result of the lack of any bar to entry. Equazcion ^(talk) 16:05, 29 Mar 2012 (UTC)

• [4]: "Are you familiar with the actual hard statistical data which shows that nearly three-quarters of all articles created by non-autoconfirmed editors are deleted, most of which are deleted immediately?" Response: "Yes, I am familiar with that statistic ... I think it mostly supports that a lot of people are trigger-happy deletionists eager to ramp up their edit counts so that they can "make admin faster" more than it means that everyone in the world has Bad Faith."
  • This seems contentious at best, especially since the statistic was about the number of new pages actually deleted (by their reviewing administrators), rather than merely the number of new pages tagged for deletion (by ordinary users possibly aspiring to become administrators). Equazcion ^(talk) 16:05, 29 Mar 2012 (UTC)

• Several comments expressing technical concerns were addressed in the following comment, where an editor presented a simple 7-line code fix: [5]. This comment received no reply.

It has been over 6 months since this overturn of consensus occurred. Per WP:Consensus can change, I'd like to re-propose this idea, in the hopes that the individuals at the Wikimedia Foundation could be persuaded to change their consensus, which apparently supersedes ours.

Consider this either as a direct re-proposal of Wikipedia:AACT (the proposal for a trial implementation), or at least as a discussion regarding the possibility of re-proposing it. I was not present or aware of the initial proposal nor its rejection by the WMF, but seeing both sides laid out in front of me now, I can say I'm thus far a firm believer that this is a good idea. Equazcion ^(talk) 16:05, 29 Mar 2012 (UTC)

I'm afraid you're mistaken with respect to reevaluating consensus. The previous proposal was not canceled by a lack of consensus, but because the WMF sort of banned its implementation as incompatible with their goals and policies for Wikipedia. I tend to agree with that view; Wikipedia is what it is because anyone could arrive and create an article from scratch without previous burocracy nor requirements. Also there's an alternate approach that is expected to solve the problem that doesn't require a prohibition for newcomers to create articles - the WMF is dedicating efforts in developing some new interfaces for the Article Creation Workflow and page triage for patrolling new articles. This change is in line with their studies to improve the experience for newcomers, improve editors retention, and should have a strong impact on most of the trivial stuff that consist the majority of the workload for patrollers. Until this new system is implemented and we see how it fares, a re-proposal would follow the same fate as the first one. Diego (talk) 17:55, 29 March 2012 (UTC)

Snap; Diego said what I was going to, but faster and nicer :). If you all want to take a look at the plans at New Page Triage, it'd be great to have your input, but I think re-running the autoconfirmed trial proposal will lead to the same outcome as last time. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 22:49, 29 March 2012 (UTC)

I also think that re-proposing ACTRIAL would be a waste of time, because attitudes have become too entrenched. In the TL;DR discussion here (start about a third of the way down, or don't bother), the refusal was defended on the grounds that the WMF Board's resolution on openness obliged the WMF staff to refuse; that argument was undercut by a Board member who pointed out that the resolution did no such thing, and said:

"In general, the Board does not micromanage the work of the projects; nor is it generally the role of the WMF to set Project editorial or community policy. An exception to that principle was made in this case, for better or for worse. But that was not directed by a Board resolution."

Having re-read all the discussion, I conclude that the refusal was not actually a matter of policy or principle but a dominance game, which is why if we ask again we shall be refused again. It will take a higher-level debate on the extent to which the WMF should try to micro-manage the volunteer projects to bring about any change. JohnCD (talk) 20:18, 1 April 2012 (UTC)

I've been working here for 6 months and not got that impression at all, from any of the staffers I've encountered. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 20:22, 2 April 2012 (UTC)

Problem is not that the proposal is not allowed by tech folks, problem is that it's too controversial. You can't go and submit a bug to bugzilla requesting to change something in such a way. No engineer in wmf would take the responsibility for this change, without having it approved by someone above him. So you should likely forward the results of proposal to Board of Trustees who are ultimately responsible for the wikimedia project, or that's how I understand it. If they agree with the change it will be surely implemented by devs immediately. Petrb (talk) 14:03, 3 April 2012 (UTC)

It wasn't the tech folks who refused, it was the Deputy Director of the WMF, Erik Möller. JohnCD (talk) 19:30, 3 April 2012 (UTC)

• I happen to agree with the WMF on this one - this should remain an encyclopedia anyone can edit. Whether this is an appropriate use of their authority ... well, it's a bit rude, but I'm not sure if the level of project autonomy given really rises to the level of being able to change the definition of the project itself. In any case, I oppose the proposal for a trial both because it is a bad idea and because apparently it won't go anywhere. Wnt (talk) 19:43, 3 April 2012 (UTC)

"Anyone can edit" is not an absolute principle - article creation is already restricted to registered accounts, image upload and article move require autoconfirmed, and so on. Moving article creation up one notch from "registered" to "autoconfirmed" is not the tremendous breach of principle it's made out to be, and really doesn't "change the definition of the project itself". But the argument is lost, and I didn't mean to start re-hashing it, only to add my voice to those saying that to re-propose ACTRIAL now would be a waste of breath. JohnCD (talk) 20:43, 3 April 2012 (UTC)

Fair warning to editors stumbling across this; Point 1. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 21:29, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

Whether or not you agree with their decision on the merits of the proposal itself is moot. It's already been discussed, consensus established, no need to rehash it. The only question is whether the rejection by WMF despite that consensus was proper (or something). There are no clear rules there, but WMF does tend to maintain the impression/facade that things are generally up to the community. Sure it's a major change, but it's legal, technically feasible, and there's broad consensus for it (plus it's just a trial for now). What's missing? I don't know. I'm lost. Equazcion ^(talk) 21:47, 4 Apr 2012 (UTC)

Equazcion , your question may be rhetorical, but as someone who supported ACTRIAL, I'll try and give a fair shot at answering it. WMF appears to believe that ACTRIAL will drive away editor in large numbers. (I personally feel the opposite, that ACTRIAL would help new editor retention, and that WMF's focus on NPT as an "alternative" to ACTRIAL demonstrates clearly that they haven't even heard the argument why.) I can't, and don't, fault WMF for trying to push for the same goals I push for. I think it's entirely fair for them to push hard back on moves that they feel could be seriously destructive. I think they're *wrong* in this case, I think they're not listening, but I do think their heart is in the right place. --joe decker^{talk to me} 22:32, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

It makes no difference if they don't think the proposal is a good one. I respect their opinion, but if they don't like the proposal they should've voted and accepted the resulting consensus like everyone else, rather than used the power they happen to have technically to impose their opinions over everyone else's. Equazcion ^(talk) 22:42, 4 Apr 2012 (UTC)

• We already know that the WMF's response wasn't proper and not following any policy, let alone any they've articulated. Thus, we also already know the response from them was hypocritical. But what exactly are we going to do about it? I sincerely doubt English Wikipedia members have enough guts to give an all or nothing ultimatum, whereupon the WMF refusing would mean us splitting off into a separate project like Spanish Wikipedia did with Enciclopedia Libre and German Wikipedia has threatened to do multiple times with many established users affirming the stance.

I don't believe we here at English Wikipedia have the backbone to take such a stance. We all love our little power here far too much to give it up, even if it means allowing the Foundation to refuse a request that, without it being implemented, is just leading to further degradation of the encyclopedia.

What the refusal has really shown is that the Foundation cares more about the "encyclopedia anyone can edit" mantra than about making a good encyclopedia. But, haven't we already known that for the longest time? I just don't see anything really resulting from any of this. Silverseren^C 22:27, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

Where they get the idea that they know better than 375 editors is beyond me. Is knowing which policies are best for the encyclopedia even in their job description? "What are we going to do about it," indeed. It comes down to that -- there might have been no valid reason for them to do what they did, but they can anyway due to logistics. There's a middle between "strike" and "shut up," though. I'll be vocal about how this shouldn't have happened, because guess what -- I can. Besides, lots of people not shutting up when wronged has proven rather powerful in itself before. Equazcion ^(talk) 22:36, 4 Apr 2012 (UTC)

My position on the subject is very well-known, given I'm the person who started the original conversation. I get the sense people are sick of listening to me on this matter, so I implore other people who feel strongly about this to say something. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 23:11, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

Statement by Scottywong

I was one of the 3 main editors (along with Blade and Kudpung) who originally attempted to implement this trial. I have some thoughts to share: It's important to accept that it is extraordinarily unlikely that the WMF will allow this trial to commence in the near term, even if we had a unanimous consensus from 50000 voters. The fact that there was a consensus is not important to them (at least, for this particular issue). This much they made clear. I agree with Joe Decker above that their heart is in the right place, but they're not listening and not making the right decision. However, I also know that they're not going to listen, at least in the near term.

I believe that any real second attempt to implement this trial will have to involve Jimmy Wales. During the course of our original attempt to implement the trial, I emailed Jimbo and got a very long and thoughtful response back. I don't think it would be right to publicize our email exchange, but I feel it would be ok to paraphrase and perhaps post a brief quote from it. In particular, Jimbo says the following regarding the trial:

"I agree with the proposed trial and I think it should proceed. I think that there are some thoughtful discussions to be had about exact implementation details, and I think that any test should involve careful measurement. The simple truth is that no one knows what this will do for new editor retention: there is at least some reason to think that it will be bad for it, and at least some reason to think that it will be good for it."

Later in the email, he specifically calls out the same two quotes from the bugzilla discussion that Equazcion lists above, and stated his firm disagreement with those ideas. The bottom line: Jimbo is (or at least, was) on our side.

In my view, the most likely path that the eventual implementation of this trial would take is this:

• WMF developers finally finish and implement the new patrolling interface and all of the features associated with WP:New Page Triage, complete with the new landing pages and everything.
• We all try it out for awhile, and we generally find that it makes new page patrolling easier and more efficient.
• Statistics are gathered both before and after the implementation of the triage stuff. We find that it has had no significant impact in the number of inappropriate articles created by brand new users on a daily basis.
• Assuming this prediction is correct, gathering broad support for the trial will be easy to achieve. At that point, a request for the trial is made directly (and publicly) to Jimbo. The implementation of the trial is directed from the top down.

So, in summary, while it's encouraging that people are still talking about the trial, it's likely a waste of time to talk about it before the implementation of Triage is proven to not solve the problem, since Triage is WMF's alternative to ACTRIAL. Don't get me wrong, I think Triage will solve other problems, but it won't solve the problem that ACTRIAL was designed to solve. The time to attempt the trial again will be when this is clearly demonstrated. —SW— ^yak 04:48, 5 April 2012 (UTC)

Well, NPT is not attempted to solve all the problems the ACTRIAL was trying to: that's where things like the landing page system, as previously described, comes in :). You'll be pleased to know that we are putting a lot of effort into the backend API so that statistics like this can be gathered more easily and in more detail. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 20:46, 6 April 2012 (UTC)

NPT was introduced to fix what WMF sees as the root problem, which is that new page patrollers are overworked and the NPP process is inefficient. While that is a problem (and it's good that it's being addressed), it's certainly not the root problem. The new landing pages, while pretty, will do next to nothing to stop the flood of new inappropriate articles being created and deleted every day. NPT will just make it somewhat easier and faster to identify and delete these articles. WMF is only interested in new editor retention, and they believe that new users will stick around if we give them the freedom to create shit articles. What they don't consider is the impact of allowing someone to put work into an article that clearly has no chance of surviving, and then subjecting that new user to watching their work get deleted by an army of patrollers who have no time to explain their actions, because they have to move right on to the next one. This happens to 3 out of 4 articles created by non-autoconfirmed users, and there are hundreds created every day. WMF is so sure that this common scenario doesn't impact new editor retention that they will not even allow a temporary trial, just to collect data and see what happens. In my opinion, this is terrifically shortsighted. I doubt that the WMF has heard the last of ACTRIAL. -Scottywong| soliloquize _ 15:10, 7 April 2012 (UTC)

Well, no. You say "the new landing pages will do next to nothing to stop the flood of new inappropriate articles...what they don't consider is the impact of allowing someone to put work into an article that clearly has no chance of surviving". The entire point of the new landing pages (well, most of the point) is to indicate to new users very clearly "please be aware your article may be deleted if: yadda yadda yadda". Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 02:49, 8 April 2012 (UTC)

Yes, but I think it would be generous to assume that maybe 50% of these new editors will even read the landing page warnings, and of those 50% maybe 10% will actually take them to heart and follow them. So, we can look forward to a 5% reduction in deleted new articles. There is a large chunk of people who come to Wikipedia determined to write an article on a non-notable subject, and most of them aren't going to let a polite warning in a red box stop them. We have two ways of stopping them: waving our hands and saying "Please don't!" but still allowing them to, or forcing them to jump over a very low bar and first make 10 edits over 4 days to ensure they minimally understand the rules here. Who knows, over those 4 days they might actually get a chance to read the wall of text that is WP:N, WP:GNG, WP:V, WP:RS, etc. ‑Scottywong| communicate _ 15:12, 8 April 2012 (UTC)

Except there's no obligation to learn any of those policies :). The crucial policies of those you picked out - WP:N and WP:GNG - are things that only apply when dealing with articles as a whole. Since we would be stopping editors from participating in creating whole articles, there is no reason to think that they would go and look them up unless they are extraordinary motivated (for the same reason that I don't see fit to read up on the user renaming policy before I go categorise articles). Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 17:54, 8 April 2012 (UTC)

Articles on possibly-viable topics get deleted for content too, like clear COI and/or failure to show notability (even though such proof still might exist); not to mention, an article full of content violations like OR is also going to get deleted. Participation in editing and/or discussion would make people more familiar with what's accepted on Wikipedia, yes even including which topics warrant articles. I think most of us became familiar with those standards that way, long before actually reading the posted rules. How long it takes for that to happen is another matter, but the autoconfirm time means at least some participation, whereas the landing page is just reading material. Required participation is always a better learning tool than required reading. Equazcion ^(talk) 18:20, 8 Apr 2012 (UTC)

It's not worth arguing, since WMF's collective ears are clearly not open on this topic. I'm just going to wait until NPT and the landing pages are implemented, and then we can look at the stats and decide how effective they were. ‑Scottywong| talk _ 13:57, 9 April 2012 (UTC)

The changes to New page patrol involved in the Newpage Triage system include addressing issues that ACTRIAL ignored. For example under the current system articles created by expanding redirects or by starting articles in sandboxes and then moving them to mainspace don't get looked at by Newpage patrol. My understanding is that both bugs will be fixed in this development - ACTRIAL would have fixed neither bug, if anything it would have made them more common as newbies found that expanding a redirect was their only way to create a new article. So don't judge New Page triage by its success at fixing the issues covered by ACTRIAL, judge it by its success at fixing the issues it intends to fix. ϢereSpielChequers 14:24, 9 April 2012 (UTC)

Our responses here are based on claims that re-proposing ACTRIAL is futile since triage is supposed to address those issues. If it's not, as you seem to be saying, maybe we should still be trying to get ACTRIAL implemented? Equazcion ^(talk) 14:31, 9 Apr 2012 (UTC)

Both would be radical changes to NewPage patrol - Triage perhaps the more radical change because ACTRIAL would have left completely unaltered newpage creation by autoconfirmed editors, conversion of redirects or moves from userspace. The newpage patrol system has gone a very long time without significant change, and there are several improvements in the triage proposal, all of which I believe have consensus and most would be complementary to any future implementation of ACTRIAL. I don't see that ACTRIAL and Triage are addressing the same issues, though there is bound to be some overlap, and others may consider that the overlap is larger than I think it is. As for reviving ACTRIAL either now or in the future, my suggestion to those who supported that idea is that you review the objections and see if you can resolve more of them. ACTRIAL had unusually large support but also substantial opposition - it may have had consensus, it certainly had clear majority support, but it was far from unanimous. I suspect that the WMF would have far more difficulty declining a proposal that 75 or 80% support. Think of it a bit like a bot proposal, if someone proposed a bot that would have circa 27% false positives it would be declined. But if the proposal could be tweaked to reduce the proportion of false positives, then it would become a more attractive option. For example we probably have the technology to write editfilters or a bot that would look at all new articles being saved by editors who don't have the Autopatroller flag and reject those that the bot thinks would probably be deleted by speedy deletion. If that was written and tuned to the point where it would reject a similar number a day as ACTRIAL but with only a 10% false positive rate then perhaps you could get a stronger level of support from the community (personally I'd still be opposed, but if you could get it down to 10% false positives I'd be far less vehemently opposed than I was to the ACTRIAL proposal), ϢereSpielChequers 15:25, 9 April 2012 (UTC)

I don't think we should have to show stronger consensus due to the foundation's refusal to accept the existing closing based on whichever arbitrary standard for consensus they might be working off of. We already have a standard, it's consensus as judged by an uninvolved closing administrator, and it should be enough. Personally I'm not interested bowing to any sort of "sorry not good enough" attitude to try and come back with a "is this to your satisfaction now?" That's not how it's supposed to work, and it's furthermore a dangerous precedent to accept and accommodate for the future.

That's disregarding, though, the fact that WMF didn't even allude to any lack of adequate consensus or questioning the closing. They simply said in more or less words that they think we "haven't thought this through" (I think those actually were the words in one comment). It doesn't seem like broader consensus would help, even if we should reasonably be willing to try to provide it, which I don't think we should.

The reason people are drawing parallels is because the new landing portion of Triage is meant to reduce the burden of new page patrol and keep new editors from having their hasty new articles deleted, just as ACTRIAL is. I think people for ACTRIAL would still be in favor of the other elements of Triage, such as the expanded redirects issue you pointed out. You're presenting it as an either/or, all-or-nothing decision (Triage vs. ACTRIAL), but it doesn't need to be. I and other feel the new landing page would not be as effective as required participation prior to article creation, in accomplishing what those features alone are meant to achieve. Equazcion ^(talk) 15:52, 9 Apr 2012 (UTC)

I agree that New Page Triage is a good thing, and the new landing pages are a good thing; and I also agree that neither of them will solve the main problem that ACTRIAL was designed to solve. The problem is that they were originally sold to us as an alternative solution to the problems that ACTRIAL would solve, and they continue to be sold to us as such. Well, I guess "sold" is not a good word choice, as it implies that we chose to buy it rather than having it forced upon us. But don't get me wrong, I think NPT is a great thing and long overdue, but I continue to believe that we would be much better off with ACTRIAL and NPT. ‑Scottywong| chat _ 16:06, 9 April 2012 (UTC)

Related proposal

I have a related proposal in mind, which I mention now because it may interest people who have commented here, and because it would need WMF co-operation, and so would need careful preparation and presentation lest, like ACTRIAL, it meets automatic refusal as going against "anyone can edit."

Many of the new pages that get deleted are not the work of vandals or incompetents, but of good-faith new editors who have not understood, because we have not explained to them, what Wikipedia is and what it is not. A policy of "Welcome everyone in, no barriers" means that hordes of people sign on who think it is another Myspace or LinkedIn or a free advertising noticeboard, and are here only to post their CV or write about themselves, their garage bands, their self-published books, their companies or their school netball teams. We let them go all the way to writing an article, sometimes putting a great deal of effort into making it look good, before deleting it. Only then do we tell them "That is not what Wikipedia is for."

Many of the "unretained" editors, and the people who complain that Wikipedia is unfriendly, are of this type. Fluffy kittens will not keep them, or make them happy. If we want to increase percentage editor retention, we should discourage those who are not here to build an encyclopedia from becoming editors at all: replace the "Everyone welcome, come on in and edit!" sign with one that says "This is a project to build an encyclopedia. If you would like to help with that, you are very welcome, click here to register an account; but if you looking for somewhere to write about yourself, your friends, your company, your band, or anything you are closely associated with, this is probably not the site for you." That would reduce the NPP/CSD load, and the number of unretained editors.

I have half-formed ideas on how to go about this. Please do not comment here - think about it, and within two or three days I will post a more detailed proposal for discussion below.

JohnCD (talk) 22:21, 5 April 2012 (UTC)

I'm going to butt in anyway (sorry!) and just point out that I agree completely with your second paragraph. That's why we're instituting the landing page system. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 20:46, 6 April 2012 (UTC)

I'm aware of the ACW/landing page work, and if I haven't commented it's because it's good stuff as far as it goes; but I don't think it does enough to solve this problem. See WP:Village pump (proposals)/Archive 87#Explain at account creation time what Wikipedia is NOT for below. JohnCD (talk) 22:35, 7 April 2012 (UTC)

That's a really interesting idea :). I'll chuck it at the editor engagement mailing list: I know we've done some work on improving the account creation interface, but really that should be a focus. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 02:50, 8 April 2012 (UTC)

Wiki Travel Guide

The core group of editors at Wikitravel are interested in moving to a WMF hosted project and being involved with a WMF run "Wiki Travel Guide" as discussed here. Per the process of creating a new project open discussion is required regarding the merits of such a proposal. Have outlined some of the positive aspects of taking on such a project to the Wikimedia movement as a whole. Comments would be appreciated. --Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 04:43, 9 April 2012 (UTC)

Nomination for Bot Approvals Group membership

Rcsprinter123 has nominated for membership of the Wikipedia:Bot Approvals Group, implementers of Wikipedia:Bot Policy. The community is invited to join the discussion of the nomination at Wikipedia:Bot Approvals Group/nominations/Rcsprinter123 2. Josh Parris 06:13, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

See my own deleted contributions

At Wikipedia:Help desk#My Own?, I asked why I was not allowed to view my own deleted contributions. Several good reasons were given not to see the content of the edits, but I cannot see any reason not to be allowed to see the articles to which the edits were made, the amount of content that was removed, and a list - sort of like "My Contributions" without "dif" buttons. Interchangeable|talk to me 23:49, 29 March 2012 (UTC)

The idea of allowing non-admins to have access to deleted material has been explicitly vetoed by the legal advisors for the Wikimedia Foundation, [6]. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Orangemike (talk • contribs)

You didn't read my proposal carefully enough. I do not want the deleted material to be accessible; I want to see a list of edits that have been deleted, without the opportunity to see the content of those edits. It would be like "My Contributions" without "dif" buttons. Say I wanted to apply to become an administrator and I looked at my edits. If I noticed that a significant number of them had been reverted, I might think, "Hmm, RfA probably won't pass me if my contributions aren't valuable and constructive. And I've been edit-warring a lot, too. Maybe I won't apply." Presto, a lot of headache for the people of RfA has been prevented. Interchangeable|talk to me 21:05, 30 March 2012 (UTC)

Seems like something which would not be needed much. You could always just ask an admin to give you the list--Jac16888 ^Talk 21:03, 30 March 2012 (UTC)

If you agree that there is no harm in having it released from an administrator to a user, why not simply make it available to the users? Why bother with the administrator conduit? Interchangeable|talk to me 21:06, 30 March 2012 (UTC)

Because its not currently technically possible to do as you suggest, and little reason for it the foundation to spend money to make it possible--Jac16888 ^Talk 21:09, 30 March 2012 (UTC)

Please explain why it is impossible. If administrators can see the list, and it would cause no harm for a user to see their own contributions, there should be no difficulty in creating the list. Interchangeable|talk to me 21:11, 30 March 2012 (UTC)

I can see the list because I have the viewdeleted right, and it includes all the links etc to the contents of the edits, it is exactly the same as a contributions page. To view the list without the links would require a new right, one which doesn't exist--Jac16888 ^Talk 21:14, 30 March 2012 (UTC)

How difficult would it be to create this right? Interchangeable|talk to me 21:17, 30 March 2012 (UTC)

No idea, but it would require someone being paid to do it, which the foundation is not going to do for the rare occasion when it might be useful, and that would be assuming you got consensus for it, which is not very likely--Jac16888 ^Talk 21:22, 30 March 2012 (UTC)

Sometimes it is the name of the article that is the problem. This is especially true of "is gay" style attack pages

cyber bullying is a problem, kids create attack pages on other kids and the link is rapidly spread via texts or social media. Currently we counter this by deleting attack pages PDQ. But if people had access to their own deleted edits, how do you prevent people circulating a link to the deleted article plus the account name and password that created it? ϢereSpielChequers 23:42, 30 March 2012 (UTC)

Once again, you didn't read my proposal carefully enough. The person will only be able to view their own contributions, and I mean the contributions, not the material itself. The material will not be visible; it will simply be a list of the user's edits that have been deleted. Furthermore, I would prefer to make this a feature visible only to registered users, not to IPs.

Will any future contributors to this proposal please read my proposal and the subsequent corrections I have made to those who have not? This is not about viewing deleted material, but a list of the articles on which material has been deleted, the amount of content that was deleted, and the edit summaries. Interchangeable|talk to me 23:57, 30 March 2012 (UTC)

"Once again?" As far as I remember this is the first time we've interacted. If you think that your proposal doesn't have the problems that I listed, then please explain why you think so. But to be very specific, in order for my comment "Sometimes it is the name of the article that is the problem. This is especially true of "is gay" style attack pages" not to be relevant to your proposal you would need to be giving people access to their deleted contributions without the name of the article they contributed to. The specific part of your proposal that I consider relevant to this was "but I cannot see any reason not to be allowed to see the articles to which the edits were made". ϢereSpielChequers 09:09, 31 March 2012 (UTC)

Interchangeable, you failed to read WSC's response. If we let you see "your own" attack page's article name, what's to stop you from sharing "your own" password with other people so that they can login and look at "your own" deleted contributions? WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:11, 31 March 2012 (UTC)

Why do you see this a major problem? Presumably any deleted page would have a noticeable banner at the top. It's not like, "lol here is my login and you can see that wikipedia totally has a page saying jack is gay! lolol". You're really grasping here. --Golbez (talk) 13:56, 2 April 2012 (UTC)

Actually I did read it, but WereSpielChequers was rather unclear in his expression of it, so I couldn't understand it. Interchangeable|talk to me 22:32, 3 April 2012 (UTC)

Why do you assume that editors who are already here to vandalize and make jokes for their friends wouldn't do that? Along the same lines but more significantly is WP:NOTWEBHOST: we already do have users who think their userpage is a great place to stash cheat-codes and other non-WP notes, why should we enable this further by allowing some of that content to persist as a completely private arena (password-protected free cloud data-store?) even after admin deletion of it? DMacks (talk) 15:37, 2 April 2012 (UTC)

I was looking at it as "lol look at what I did on Wikipedia" which is such a marginal case it can't possibly play into decision making. But now I see what you mean, using it as a private data storage, and that is a legitimate concern. --Golbez (talk) 15:48, 2 April 2012 (UTC)

Webspace is so cheap nowadays that we shouldn't be too concerned at a few cent's worth being used as free webspace. But cyber bullying is a serious problem and we shouldn't dismiss it a merely "lol look at what I did on Wikipedia". There is a reason why we prioritise the deletion of attack pages and why I and many others put time in to finding and deleting them. Creating a loophole for cyber bullies is not something to be done lightly or without due regard for the consequences. ϢereSpielChequers 19:26, 3 April 2012 (UTC)

Cyberbullying presumably means the person being bullied knows they're being bullied. Do you expect most people to get an email from someone they hate saying, "Log in to Wikipedia with this username and password and look at this link!" and actually do it? As for webspace being cheap: True, but that doesn't mean we should be in the business of providing it. --Golbez (talk) 14:29, 5 April 2012 (UTC)

Once again, I'm not sure if any of you get this. This feature would enable people to see a list of edits that have been reverted, but not links to the material itself. So the deleted pages would still be invisible. Interchangeable 22:52, 5 April 2012 (UTC)

We get it. As has already been explained, this would require a coding change, and you've not provided a compelling reason why it would be worth that much trouble. — The Hand That Feeds You:^Bite 21:06, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

User group rights anomaly

It strikes me as odd that in Special:Listgrouprights, torunblocked is only listed for IP Block Exempt, whereas Admins (and hence those above them) automatically get the rest of those types of privileges. Perhaps this permission ought also be inherited by Admins (and hence Crats etc.)? The move seems to make sense especially given that Admins already have proxyunbannable, which IPBE doesn't have, currently making it unclear just who is being trusted with what. It Is Me Here ^{t / c} 15:46, 6 April 2012 (UTC)

Hi, that permission isn't part of any other set right now, if it should be you can propose it and then it can be implemented. However there isn't probably need for that. If any administrator needed this flag, they could just give themselves the mentioned flag. Petrb (talk) 11:05, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

Well, I am trying to propose it – or am I in the wrong place; do I need to go to VPP for that? It Is Me Here ^{t / c} 11:31, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

http://noc.wikimedia.org/conf/highlight.php?file=InitialiseSettings.php says:

# groupOverrides2 @{
'groupOverrides2' => array(
    'default' => array(
...
        // Deployed to all wikis by Andrew, 2009-04-28
        'ipblock-exempt' => array(
            'ipblock-exempt' => true,
            'torunblocked' => true,
        ),

Does that mean ipblock-exempt implies torunblocked at Wikimedia wikis? PrimeHunter (talk) 13:02, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

Firstly, ipblock-exempt is both used as a group and as a right.

The line with 'ipblock-exempt' => array( contains it as the group, where it prepares to accept the rights for the group. The other two lines ('ipblock-exempt' => true, and 'torunblocked' => true,) define the rights available to the group. As the localized name of the ipblock-exempt usergroup here is "IP block exemptions", we say that IP block exemptions have the ipblock-exempt right. Basically, to answer your last question, yes, but to be specific, ipblock-exempt the group (not the right!!).  Hazard-SJ  ㋡  00:28, 11 April 2012 (UTC)

Thanks. So administrators have the ipblock-exempt right which does not give them the torunblocked right, but they can assign them themselves the ipblock-exempt group which does give them the torunblocked right. PrimeHunter (talk) 00:59, 11 April 2012 (UTC)

No, the members of ipblock-exempt group have the permission, members of sysop group do not. Sysops do have the permission ipblock-exempt but aren't members of that group (permission is names same as group, which is confusing, but correct) Petrb (talk) 08:30, 11 April 2012 (UTC)

Nevermind :-) Petrb (talk) 08:38, 11 April 2012 (UTC)

I can't remember where this was discussed, but I remember having this conversation a couple years ago. I believe the logic was that some admins will use proxies for a valid reason, but few will use tor for a valid reason. Preventing admins from using tor helps discourage admin socking. They have to paint a red target on their back by giving themselves the right. I believe this was an issue in at least a handful of desysopping cases. MBisanz ^talk 01:12, 11 April 2012 (UTC)

OK, that makes sense. My main thought was that it was inconsistent for both user groups to imply a higher level of trust than the other one in some sense (I thought it would make more sense that one be a superset of the other), but I suppose that's more frivolous than the reasoning you put forward. It Is Me Here ^{t / c} 16:28, 11 April 2012 (UTC)

Transfer polling templates from commons

To aid in FPC(and in other discussions) for easy identification of support and oppose(while counting opinions), I propose to transfer some polling templates from Wikimedia Commons.
Currently, voters to FPC have to type Support/Oppose/Comment and bold it. Using templates would

• reduce time required to type.
• easily identify votes(due to the green + / red -) symbols

Major templates are {{Abstain}}, {{Support}}(shortened to {{s}}), {{Oppose}} (shortened to {{o}}), {{Neutral}}(could be changed to {{vote neutral}}, {{Comment}}, {{Info}}, {{Question}}, {{Fixed}}, {{withdraw}}.

Minor templates would be {{strong support}}, {{weak support}}, {{strong oppose}}, {{weak oppose}}. {{Vote keep}}/{{keep}} and {{delist}} could be used for delist candidates of FPC.

Additionally {{Vote Delete}} could be used along with {{vote keep}} in deletion discussions.--Gauravjuvekar (talk) 10:23, 11 April 2012 (UTC)

There's already an easier way to deal with this. Go into Special:MyPage/skin.js and add: importScript('User:Ais523/votesymbols.js');

That translates all the bolded !votes and gives them symbols to make it easier to pick out. — The Hand That Feeds You:^Bite 12:45, 11 April 2012 (UTC)

Personally I find those templates very visually jarring. ♫ Melodia Chaconne ♫ (talk) 13:34, 11 April 2012 (UTC)

I'm not at home right now, so I don't really have the time to dig up the specific TFD's, but this has been done in the past (I'm almost positive that the templates on Commons were originally copied from here). Every time one of these templates pops up it ends up being deleted though. There's nothing stopping anyone from recreating one of these (I don't think that any of the template pages are salted, currently), but there's been a fairly consistent history of them being deleted. I know that if I happen to see a template like one of these come up at TFD, that I'll throw my support behind getting it deleted, at least.
— V = IR (Talk • Contribs) 15:51, 11 April 2012 (UTC)

Proposal in collaboration with WFP (World Food Programme)

Hello,

I think about a new interesting proposal.. Wikipedia/Wikimedia can make a donation project in collaboration with WFP (World Food Programme).

Many people want to help.

I'm sure about that. --Tegra3 (talk) 12:55, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

Not sure what you're proposing. Are you asking for Wikipedia to do a donation drive for WFP? — The Hand That Feeds You:^Bite 16:24, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

Tegra, stop your useless proposals. Choyoołʼįįhí:Seb az86556 ^{> haneʼ} 18:45, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

@HandThatFeeds, in up of the page a redirect donation in collaboration with WFP :-) --Tegra3 (talk) 10:59, 6 April 2012 (UTC)

@Seb_az86556 for you useless.. for me not. --Tegra3 (talk) 11:02, 6 April 2012 (UTC)

Surely food for thought, so to speak. Sorry, I couldn't resist. Regards, RJH (talk) 16:08, 6 April 2012 (UTC)

A more open-minded response would probably come from proposing that Wikipedia hold regular donation drives for causes outside the project in general, as I think that's the real concern. Equazcion ^(talk) 16:24, 6 Apr 2012 (UTC)

Which I don't think should be done. Other charitable organizations are perfectly capable of raising their own funds (and those that are not probably don't need to be around...), but more importantly, donation drives for other charities here would almost certainly dilute the ability of the WMF to raise funds for themselves.
— V = IR (Talk • Contribs) 20:35, 6 April 2012 (UTC)

Yet another Facebooky suggestion from Tegra3. Oppose this as just another effort to make us less like an encyclopedia and more like Gaia Online. --Orange Mike | Talk 20:06, 12 April 2012 (UTC)

Gadget for opening search results and suggestions in new tabs

I, the original poster, moved this to Wikipedia:Village pump (technical). --Timeshifter (talk) 10:12, 12 April 2012 (UTC)

Share button

Discussion

Hey, just a suggestion. I personally would like to have a Share button so that I can directly share articles or photos on Wikipedia on Facebook or whatever. Especially like the photo of the day, but really on everything would be cool. Kag427 (talk) 22:28, 22 March 2012 (UTC)

• Oppose: Wikipedia isn't a social network.Jasper Deng (talk) 22:27, 22 March 2012 (UTC)
• See User:TheDJ/Sharebox. This is a perennial proposal, and nonsensical opposition like Jasper's is the norm. Of course Wikipedia is not a social network - but why should that stop us facilitating the sharing of the knowledge of Wikipedia on social networks? Fences&Windows 22:33, 22 March 2012 (UTC)
• This has been proposed several times and shot down every time. --Cybercobra (talk) 22:55, 22 March 2012 (UTC)
• Support per Fences. The more perennial a proposal, the more evidence that it could be worth revisiting. Wikipedia is not a social network, but facilitating sharing of our content through those sites doesn't somehow turn us into one. Plenty of other news sites and other info sources do this without themselves turning into social networking sites. Social networking is a prominent tool that other sites can and should make use of. The resistance to it is based on a stale and archaic feeling that association with social networking means catering to a teen trend, but if that ever were true, it certainly isn't anymore. Equazcion ^(talk) 13:27, 23 Mar 2012 (UTC)
• Oppose The ability to copy and paste URLs is already built into everyone's browsers. Wikipedia must not host any of the tracking code that comes from any of those socially sites. Ntsimp (talk) 14:26, 23 March 2012 (UTC)
• Oppose Wikipedia is not a social network and should not be. Mugginsx (talk) 16:06, 1 April 2012 (UTC)
  • Agreed, let's not host tracking code. Should it be decided that there's consensus for a share button, we can then discuss possible ways of implementing it without any such tracking. Equazcion ^(talk) 14:38, 23 Mar 2012 (UTC)
• Support : What's the point of having all this information if it can't be accessed easily? Paper encyclopedias were made obsolete by (desktop/server) CDs, CDs were made obsolete by the Internet (and... Wikipedia), but now social media and smartphones/tablets are becoming a large player in the way that information is accessed and shared. It's a question of "evolve or die". Best, Markvs88 (talk) 15:08, 23 March 2012 (UTC)

• Support if it's easy to disable in preferences and doesn't have share options to Wikimedia projects or other sites where it's probably unwanted. Wikipedia is not a social network but why make it harder for users to share Wikipedia on actual social networks? Copy-pasting a url may seem trivial to us but many of our readers have asked for a share feature which can be simpler and prettier. Many people today are used to share features and it will make more users give us free "advertising" whether or not we are elitist enough to claim that it shouldn't make a difference. Copy-pasting also has potential traps. http:// is sometimes omitted, and many link-parsing programs will ignore a trailing ')' as used in our disambiguations. PrimeHunter (talk) 15:24, 23 March 2012 (UTC)
• Comment Before we go any further with this, what buttons do we intend to put on the new "feature". As noted in the last discussion, there are hundred of social networking sites. It wouldn't be feasible to list all of them, as it would render the tool useless. We would have to leave some of them out. In doing so, we would be breaking our position as a neutral encyclopedia. Having a limited number of buttons is no better than having a big social networking ad on all articles. Both would result in many editors leaving the project. If you want the tool for just yourself, then install the .js script, but before installing it sitewide it might be worth considering the consequences. Alpha_Quadrant (talk) 15:37, 23 March 2012 (UTC)
  • As noted below, there are 330 services. I am not sure what order AddThis presents them in initially, but as you use them, the most used move to the top of the list. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 15:42, 23 March 2012 (UTC)
  • It would be easy enough to have a Preferences tab to choose the ones registered users want. For initial display and anonymous users, we'd need to figure out a method of choosing, sure; but I don't think that's something we need to decide "before we go any further". Ie. the POV issue shouldn't be a block to this proposal. We'll deal with the caveats once we've established consensus that the community is in favor of the feature in general. As for scripts, they're great if you know how to use them, but I'd go out on a limb and say the majority of users who would need a share button to share an article are generally not the ones who would easily find out about the script, or even know how to install scripts. Equazcion ^(talk) 16:00, 23 Mar 2012 (UTC)
  • You often have to make choices, also when creating articles, adding entries to lists, adding references and external links, and so on. I assume a new share feature would be similar to User:TheDJ/Sharebox which places a "Share" link in the toolbox. You have to click that to see any of the available options. If you click an ISBN number in an article then you get a page like Special:BookSources/0-596-51516-2 with many options. If you enable "Add a selector to the Wikipedia search page allowing the use of external search engines" at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-gadgets then you get 5 external options at Special:Search. I don't think we should be so afraid of making choices that it prevents useful features for those who want to use them. PrimeHunter (talk) 16:12, 23 March 2012 (UTC)
• Support This is a total no brainer. Claiming that social networks have nothing to do with a collaborative wiki is exagerated to say the least. It overlooks our talk pages which are one giant social network without face pics dedicated to spreading information). Nit picking about which social network to use is just nit picking and can be constructively dealt with in the process of implementing the feature. --Shabidoo | Talk 16:47, 23 March 2012 (UTC)
• Support, but please allow individual users to disable it for themselves: (edit conflict) I am proud to not be a user of Facebook or Twitter (or any social networking site) and thus not be infected with the disease/plague that has enslaved the world in the past few years. But the fact remains that there really isn't any good reason to not implement a share button. We could make it a gadget for registered users that is turned off by default, but where does that leave the countless unregistered readers who are infected with the plague and would like to share Wikipedia content on their social networking site of choice? I don't want to be forced to have the share button looking at me when I browse Wikipedia, so I believe that individual users should be able to disable it for themselves.

Adding a share button does not make Wikipedia a social networking site; it simply makes it easier for people who may not be technically savvy enough to know how to copy URLs to share Wikipedia content on their social networking site of choice. The reasoning that some opposing !votes use, that "Wikipedia is not a social network", are so baseless that they should be struck out or ignored. There is NO rule that I see at WP:NOTSOCIAL that would forbid a share button.

There are some privacy concerns above on having a share button. If the share button can be implemented without it tracking users, etc., then there is no good reason that I can think of to oppose having a share button.

—{|Retro00064|☎talk|✍contribs|} 17:08, 23 March 2012 (UTC).

• Conditional Support/Strong Oppose I would support under the following conditions: (1) There are zero privacy issues (not even what is mentioned below as point 1 under #Sharebox privacy) when nothing is shared, and it can be disabled in preferences; or (2) it is not enabled by default, and the privacy issues are clearly mentioned next to the "enable" checkbox. Otherwise, I strongly oppose. I also note that something not meeting these conditions would most likely violate m:Privacy policy by leaking IP addresses and page view statistics to a third party without the consent of the user involved. Note that my condition #1 effectively requires that no scripts or images are loaded from non-Wikimedia urls, at least until a share is actually initiated. #2 could be done now by making Sharebox into a non-enabled-by-default gadget. Anomie⚔ 17:16, 23 March 2012 (UTC)
• Strong Oppose, no benefit is obtained by making canvassing easier nor to send free traffic to one commercial website over another. Also, the WMF is working, afaik, on a well made extension to do this and discussion should be delayed until such a tool is available. Snowolf ^{How can I help?} 23:01, 23 March 2012 (UTC)
• Conditional Support per the two provisions proposed by Anomie. Just because WP is not a social network does not mean that its content cannot or should not be shared on social media venues. On the contrary, it would be great promotional tool. Besides, I see WP content posted on FB fairly often as it is. That said, as Anomie notes, privacy issues are of vital importance and must be adequately addressed. Also, the feature should be optional for users as it may viewed by some "as a privacy threat (even if these concerns are properly and effectively addressed) or as an attempt to "social media-ize" Wikipedia. I also agree with Anomie (and others who have voiced similar concerns) that if these stipulations are not met, the proposal should not be implemented.--JayJasper (talk) 20:04, 24 March 2012 (UTC)
• Strongest ever oppose I'd personally be discouraging these things. OK, social networking is good. But there has to some limit. Never ever. WP:NOTFACEBOOK clearly states that WP is not a social network. Those who want can use User:The DJ's sharebox. Remember, privacy is also concerned. AddThis is still collecting a lot of statistics, but less then when they actually track your browser. Dipankan says.. ^{("Be bold and edit!")} 09:54, 26 March 2012 (UTC)
• Oppose. Share buttons can be useful on pages with dynamic URLs, but since any link to a Wikipedia article will always work (barring deletion or modification to a redirect), there's no need. You can simply copy the URL of the page you're looking at and paste it into the email or whatever other type of message or document you're writing. Nyttend (talk) 14:36, 26 March 2012 (UTC)
• Strong oppose - solution without a problem, perennially offered by social-media advocates who don't understand the concept of "encyclopedia". None of these services lack a facility to simply post the URL of any Wikipedia article you wish to "share"! Besides, this is impossible to do without adding privacy-invading code, favoring one service over another, etc. --Orange Mike | Talk 15:34, 26 March 2012 (UTC)
  • No one claimed it was a solution to a problem. It's merely a proposed improvement, and one that's been requested by many people who might not find copy/pasting as intuitive as we do. To claim that it's only suggested by "social media advocates" would be unfair. I'm no social media advocate. Those share buttons seem entirely superfluous to me. Nevertheless my support for this is based on my stance that we should be vigilante in not surrendering to our own dorky pedantic techie asperger club tendencies by saying that them there sharing buttons those kids are using these days are totally unnecessary, when everyone else seems to think they are. There should be some limited accommodation for something the audience seems to want, even if we the providers don't see the need. Equazcion ^(talk) 17:30, 26 Mar 2012 (UTC)
• Oppose—share buttons are not, on balance, in our interest. There are 4 main parties to consider: readers, editors, Wikipedia as a whole, and social media sites. Social media sites would love it if we added share buttons, because it sends them traffic—that's the whole reason those annoying buttons exist: to reduce the effort of being active on a site by embedding external opportunities to visit it. Most sites use these mini advertisements for social networks because there's a symmetric effect: if someone shares a link to their site, then they, in effect, receive free advertising to that person's friends through the social network. Since Wikipedia as a whole gets a lot of traffic anyway, the benefit here to Wikipedia is minimal. There is a good argument that it helps technophobe readers, but I don't think that that's a strong enough point to counter the fact that it might introduce tracking of Wikipedia users to some degree, or that it's inherently non-neutral because any reasonable interface will highlight the most-used networks first. I would support some sharing functionality, but only on the conditions that it a) benefit editors somehow (they get little to no benefit from standard "sharing" as editors) b) be strictly opt-in, and c) strictly avoid introducing users to more tracking than is expected in our Privacy policy. I'm not sure how those conditions could be fulfilled. {{Nihiltres|talk|edits|⚡}} 18:30, 26 March 2012 (UTC)
  • Although the explicit arguments you provide here have to do with privacy and neutrality, they seem to be an incidental excuse to back up your revulsion to giving free advertising to social networks, which overshadows most of this comment. I think this is a good example of the general feeling here. I join everyone in that feeling, I just don't think my personal disgust is a good reason to block a feature that objectively is useful to everyone outside our inner sanctum. As much as we shouldn't seek to advertise other sites, we also shouldn't explicitly seek to avoid doing it incidentally at the cost of a feature readers will find useful. As for NPOV and ensuring privacy, I think it's already understood that supporters of this feature have those as prerequisites. Equazcion ^(talk) 18:52, 26 Mar 2012 (UTC)
    • I won't hide my distaste; I don't want Wikipedia to give social networks (specifically, big social networks) free advertising. However, I think that the "objectively" useful feature of bypassing a bit of copy-pasting is trivial enough that it is balanced by concerns of privacy and neutrality, and I don't see that it benefits Wikipedia itself to add "share" buttons. Since I don't see a net benefit, I don't think it's a good idea. {{Nihiltres|talk|edits|⚡}} 20:08, 26 March 2012 (UTC)
• Support as an option in preferences people could enable. Also I think we could make a gadget for this. Petrb (talk) 09:09, 2 April 2012 (UTC)
• Strong oppose – Social networks generally have ways to "share" anything, whether the website being linked to or scraped has a "share" button or not. Many websites, including Facebook, have bookmarklets for this purpose as well. Hyperlinks work just fine when referencing a Wikipedia article and we already have too much obtrusive and unnecessary JavaScript slowing things down and taking up screen real estate. Facebook also already lets you "like" articles on Wikipedia. Not everybody wants social networking crap on every website they visit, and Wikipedia has for a long time been one of the only popular, useful websites to not have advertising and try to stay away from irrelevant intrusive crap. —danhash (talk) 18:40, 4 April 2012 (UTC)
• Oppose. See Nihiltres, probably best response. Choyoołʼįįhí:Seb az86556 ^{> haneʼ} 18:53, 4 April 2012 (UTC)
• Oppose per my reasoning the last seven times this has been brought up in the past year. Sven Manguard Wha? 21:09, 10 April 2012 (UTC)
• Support There is no good reason not to do this. Using just the most popular sites means that there is no violation of the "neutral encyclopedia" principle. I agree that this would not be incredibly easier or faster to use, but there is no good reason not to use it. I would, however, suggest that users be given the option to disable it. Robert 17:48, 11 April 2012 (UTC)
  • Nonsense! "Using just the most popular sites" means that in fact we would be entrenching and reinforcing the current popular sites (as we see them through our cultural and technological blinders), and making sure the winners stay on top. We are not here to pick the winners, and that would be a total violation of the neutral encyclopedia principle. --Orange Mike | Talk 20:14, 12 April 2012 (UTC)
• Support. We want to drive traffic to the site. Anything that gets us more readers and more editors is a good thing. Virtually every modern web site has Share buttons, from the BBC News[7] to Harvard University.[8] Even Nature, the world's most cited interdisciplinary scientific journal[9] lets its readers share knowledge with others. I don't see any reason why we shouldn't make it easier for our readers to share knowledge with others. A Quest For Knowledge (talk) 20:19, 12 April 2012 (UTC)
• Oppose Our readers are able to copy paste the url and send it to others. This method is much better than any share button. Those who want to use a sharebutton can use a script in their vector.js. Von Restorff (talk) 13:29, 15 April 2012 (UTC)

Previous discussions

• Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Archive 81#Does Wikipedia need a “share” button?
• Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Archive 73#Let 'em like 'em
• Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Archive 74#Link to Facebook
• Wikipedia:Help desk/Archives/2011 February 24#Sharing using twitter
• Wikipedia:Help desk/Archives/2011 March 10#How do you share, or link, an article? Can you? Do I have to copy the URL?
• Wikipedia:Help desk/Archives/2011 April 7#Please Integrate Wikipedia with Social Media Sites such as Facebook, Twitter etc
• Wikipedia:Help desk/Archives/2011 April 20#Sharing Wikipedia Articles With Facebook Friends
• Wikipedia:Help desk/Archives/2011 April 21#Clickable Facebook icons on your pages, so my Facebook friends can click on the heading and read the Wikipedia page.
• Wikipedia:Help desk/Archives/2011 September 15#sharing with social sites?
• Wikipedia:Help desk/Archives/2011 July 28#Sharing
• Wikipedia:Help desk/Archives/2011 October 11#Printing suggestion
• Wikipedia:Help desk/Archives/2011 December 16#email
• Wikipedia:Village pump (miscellaneous)/Archive 36#I just donated...
• Wikipedia:Help desk/Archives/2011 December 22#Forwarding an article.

Each of these has gotten bogged down in "Wikipedia is not a social media site." While that statement is quite true, it has nothing to do with giving users the tools to share on other sites. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 14:18, 23 March 2012 (UTC)

I removed the thread for changing the size of PDF downloads; except for the final (irrelevant, as far as I can see) comment on the thread, it was completely unrelated to social media. Nyttend (talk) 14:39, 26 March 2012 (UTC)

• Oppose. To add another policy here, Wikipedia is supposed to be neutral in policy. If we link to certain sites, it will be very difficult to keep from endorsing them indirectly. The only possible way to remain neutral and create the ability to share on any social network.

Additionally, I'm rather afraid that this will create a flood of uninitiated users who will start to use the talk page for discussion of the article's topic, making it impossible for contributing users to discuss improvements to the article. Interchangeable|talk to me 20:49, 30 March 2012 (UTC)

Sharebox services

The Sharebox user script uses the AddThis bookmarking service to add e-mail and share buttons to the Wikipedia toolbar. As of March 20120, AddThis supports 330 services. A few highlights:

• • Blogging platforms— LiveJournal, Twitter, TypePad and WordPress
  • Bookmarking sites— including the reference management sites CiteULike and Connotea
  • Email— generic, AOL Mail, Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail
  • Social news— Digg, Fark and Slashdot
  • Social networks— Facebook, Google+, Myspace, orkut, LinkedIn and Plaxo
  • Shopping— Amazon.com and Kaboodle
  • Tools— Google Reader, Google Translate, W3C HTML Validator, print tools, PDF tools, screen capture tools and Whois

---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 14:18, 23 March 2012 (UTC)

Sharebox privacy

From User:TheDJ/Sharebox:

1. This tool tells AddThis not to track you. I'm not guaranteeing that they don't track you. AddThis is still collecting a lot of statistics, but less then when they actually track your browser.
2. If you are concerned, just don't use this, or write a new tool that has all the AddThis functionality. I looked around, it does not seem there are any usable open source alternatives that have the amount of share options of AddThis.
3. The Facebook and Twitter icons used by AddThis, are simply share links. They do not have the privacy issues of Facebook's own Share and Like buttons. Yes these major sharing websites know a lot about you, but that doesn't mean that this is automatic. By not using the official buttons of these websites, but simple links, you are in control about what the site knows about you. In practice this means they know what you share, not what you read. If you don't want them to know what you share, don't share.

— Preceding unsigned comment added by Gadget850 (talk • contribs) 15:39, 23 March 2012 (UTC)

Share by email

Many people oppose comparing this to a social network. I simply don't see a reason, this proposal is called "add a share button" not "convert this project to a social site". A simple button allowing users to share the article / picture using email would be a good for beginning, and later if found useful should be extended to more services, which could be defined by user. If this tool was opt-in there is no problem with privacy and doesn't affect anyone else but the people who want it. So why could ever someone oppose this with a reason "wikipedia is not a social site" do these people even think of it, before hitting oppose? Petrb (talk) 09:16, 2 April 2012 (UTC)

List of Indian Launch Articles.

Resolvedd͡ʒd͡ʑɸ I am young to the village pump. A few minutes old to the village pump. I propose the making of artcle:List of Indian Launch Vehicles--Monareal (talk) 11:16, 3 April 2012 (UTC)

See Indian Space Research Organisation#Launch vehicle fleet and the navbox at the bottom. You can discuss any expansion on the talk page. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 11:47, 3 April 2012 (UTC)

Well, I demand a separate article with contents in a text.Last year, an article was deleted because a sub article existed. I just don't know why they delete articles in favour of subarticles. Moreover the creator of the article had also made a article about GSLV-D3 which was merged with GSAT-4(Its payload) as a subarticle.--Monareal (talk) 16:08, 3 April 2012 (UTC)

To avoid deletion, combine your article with the other if possible. Mugginsx (talk) 18:59, 3 April 2012 (UTC)

Yeah but I can't merge the articles. ISRO is about a space organization. I am talking about the making of List of Indian Launch Vehicles which is a list of the launch vehicles the organization has.--Monareal (talk) 06:02, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

Looking at the articles, I think the proposal has some merit actually. I'll be happy to help. I wrote Chinese space station which has stood the test of time, even though it won't exist for more than a decade yet, and a few others, what a hoot. I'll give you a bit of a hand there Monareal. Use my talkpage initially. Penyulap ☏ 07:12, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

My God is the earth being Bombed!--Monareal (talk) 06:26, 5 April 2012 (UTC)

you mean the earthquake ? did u see it a week ahead? Penyulap ☏ 16:28, 11 April 2012 (UTC)

You!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!--Monareal (talk) 16:47, 14 April 2012 (UTC)

Request to add tag

Hello. I have proposed MediaWiki:Tag-changing height or weight-description for creation at User talk:99.70.103.243/Proposed for creation/MediaWiki:Tag-changing height or weight-description. This proposed creation is for the description of a tag, which I do not have the user privilege level to create. Can I request that an administrator move the page to create it if (s)he approves my request? Thanks in advance. 99.70.103.243 (talk) 04:11, 16 April 2012 (UTC)

That seems like tag overkill. Why not just revert unsourced changes to a person's height/weight? Equazcion ^(talk) 04:16, 16 Apr 2012 (UTC)

Sorry for miswording this. I meant to say that this is a description for a tag, which you can see at Special:Tags. Almost all of them have descriptions which clarify the meaning of the tag, therefore, I am requesting the addition of this for clarification on it. You can see the page which I have created in my userspace, and, if it is approved, please move it into the MediaWiki space. Thanks. 99.70.103.243 (talk) 04:25, 16 April 2012 (UTC)

Since no one seems to have noticed this I'll go ask an admin for help. Equazcion ^(talk) 00:25, 17 Apr 2012 (UTC)

 Done moved. Eagles 24/7 (C) 00:42, 17 April 2012 (UTC)

More softwares like stiki

Stiki is a super-software that allows people to revert so many vandalism in an hour, that it takes 5 hours to revert the same amount of vandalism on twinkle. But I do not understand why anyone would still waste their time with the undo function or twinkle. So, I want to make a bot that lets users know about Stiki as soon as they make their first revert.--Deathlaser (talk) 16:55, 16 April 2012 (UTC)

Doing things quickly precludes doing them carefully. For many users, especially those just getting into countervandalism, care is a requirement, not only to avoid mistakes, but to learn just what to do. While fancy tools may be useful for dedicated users experienced in the area, encouraging those not at that point to use such things is not only apt to harm the wiki directly, but for the things requiring more complex setups, the requirement to set them up can potentially put users off the idea of working in related areas at all. — Isarra ༆ 19:28, 16 April 2012 (UTC)

Also, most people don't like spam. — Isarra ༆ 19:29, 16 April 2012 (UTC)

Policy and guideline classification

We currently organize our policy and guideline pages into categories that indicate the character of the document, by classifying them as "Policy", "Guideline", or "Essay". I'd like to propose adding an additional classification to those, which would work to indicate the scope of the page. These could be "Core", "General", and "Specialty". Doing this would allow us to differentiate policies and guidelines a bit more than we currently do, so that we could have "Core Policy", "Core Guideline"; "General Policy", "General Guideline"; and "Specialty Policy", "Specialty Guideline" (essays could use it too, of course). I'd be interested in hearing anyone's thoughts and concerns on this subject.
— V = IR (Talk • Contribs) 03:01, 9 April 2012 (UTC)

How would you define the scope of "Core", "General", and "Specialty"? Regards, RJH (talk) 14:50, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

Consensus, like most everything else, I assume. In my mind I'd think that "Core" stick fairly close to the pillars though, whereas "Specialty" would be things such as specific naming conventions guidelines. I think that people already do this to a certain extent, but there's quite a bit of conflation between the idea of "importance" with "character". People talk about "promotion" or "demotion" to or from "policy" and "guideline" status all of the time, which... isn't really the way things are supposed to be. Rather than continuing to fight that, the idea here is to give it an outlet. If we explicitly mark things as being "very important" or "important only in specific instances", then that should help I would think.
— V = IR (Talk • Contribs) 22:13, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

I guess I'm still unclear about how this would be beneficial. Unless it allows me to readily filter out inapplicable material, the net cost seems to be the same. Regards, RJH (talk) 17:31, 13 April 2012 (UTC)

I don't know that it would reduce the amount of conflict necessarily, but it should at least clarify things. We see discussions (to be charitable) breaking out on policy and guideline talk pages fairly consistently, talking about changing the classification to or from a policy or guideline. It's just something that I've noticed, that there is a lot of... judgements about importance and reach associated with the "policy" and "guideline" tags themselves. It's not supposed to be that way (things such as "policy 'trumps' guidelines", for example), but that's out there, and this is intended to deal with such thinking.
— V = IR (Talk • Contribs) 00:56, 14 April 2012 (UTC)

• Incidentally, I was just thinking last night that we could develop a single mbox template to use, instead of the separate ones currently located in Category:Policy and guidelines header templates, concurrently with this proposal.
  — V = IR (Talk • Contribs) 22:15, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

If we have so many policies that they need categorizing, we should get rid of some. Grandiose (me, talk, contribs) 22:26, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

Hah! Not laughing at you, as I tend to agree with the sentiment, but that ship has long since sailed.
— V = IR (Talk • Contribs) 22:45, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

(What I find funny is that most Wikipedians agree that we have too many policies and guidelines, and if you ask them whether we should get rid of some, the answer will be "Yes"... but... ask them if a specific policy or guideline should be cut, the answer will be "No".... just saying.) Blueboar (talk) 20:01, 11 April 2012 (UTC)

Yea, no kidding. Actually, there aren't many that I would get rid of completely, but if I could play "King of Wikipedia" for any length of time I would severely cut a lot of policy and guideline pages. There's just too much clutter, to most of them.
— V = IR (Talk • Contribs) 01:23, 12 April 2012 (UTC)

Part of the issue with the guidelines seems to be bloat caused by examples and special cases. For example, can a particular guideline be elucidated in one or two clearly written sentences, with additional material below in an expandable box? Take MOS:FULLSTOP as an example of guideline bloat. Can this be written as 1–2 clear sentences followed by an expandable box? Regards, RJH (talk) 17:31, 13 April 2012 (UTC)

Expandable boxes are an WP:ACCESS violation. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:54, 18 April 2012 (UTC)

Redirect tagging

Would it be possible to tag redirects as you make a move? For example, when moving a species article to conform with the guidelines on their naming, a way to automatically have {{R from other capitalisation}} on the Redirect page would simplify things (saves a whole new edit process). CMD (talk) 04:45, 9 April 2012 (UTC)

I don't think it could be done easily without using JavaScript or a bot.  Hazard-SJ  ㋡  00:18, 11 April 2012 (UTC)

I was just thinking that as the software automatically creates a redirect, if there was the possibility of placing text in the move request that would automatically be added to it as well. CMD (talk) 11:52, 15 April 2012 (UTC)

You might inquire with the WP:Twinkle folks. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:57, 18 April 2012 (UTC)

Explain at account creation time what Wikipedia is NOT for

It will sound like heresy, but I think we are too welcoming. There are some potential users we should discourage.

Many of the new pages that get deleted are not the work of vandals or incompetents, but of good-faith new editors who have not understood, because we have not explained to them, what Wikipedia is and what it is not. A policy of "Welcome everyone in, no barriers" means that hordes of people sign on who think it is another Myspace or LinkedIn or a free advertising noticeboard, and are here only to post their CV or write about themselves, their garage bands, their self-published books, their companies or their school netball teams. We let them go all the way to writing an article, sometimes putting a great deal of effort into making it look good, before deleting it. Only then do we tell them "That is not what Wikipedia is for."

Many of the "unretained" editors, and the people who complain that Wikipedia is unfriendly, are of this type. Fluffy kittens will not make them happy, or keep them. If we want to increase percentage editor retention, we should discourage those who are not here to build an encyclopedia from becoming editors at all: replace the "Everyone welcome, come on in and edit!" sign over the gate with one that says "This is a project to build an encyclopedia. If you would like to help with that, you are very welcome, but if you looking for somewhere to write about yourself, your friends, your band, etc, this is probably not the site for you." That would reduce the NPP/CSD load, and the number of unretained editors.

The new mw:Article Creation Workflow/Landing System is intended to address this problem among others, and it looks good and will certainly help, but in my view it is not enough.

• The advice and warnings it provides are only given to logged-in editors - IPs are taken straight to the account creation screen. I believe that someone who has actually set up an account is more likely to persist with an unsuitable article despite the warnings.
• Nowhere does it actually break the news to the hopeful newbie who plans to write about his garage band that there are some articles we simply don't want: he is funnelled into the Article Creation Wizard, and although that does contain discouragement from writing COI or NN articles, plenty of them get through it, or the authors bomb out of it and write them anyway..

My suggestion is that we should explain before account creation what Wikipedia is not for.

Under the ACW scheme, an IP would be taken to this screen. Presently, if you click on "Don't have an account? Create one." you get something similar. In each case, all that is asked for is a username and password. This is the point where more is needed.

Too many words will not be read, so we have to keep it simple. I would like the first screen to say something like:

Wikipedia is a project to build a free encyclopedia. In order to be a useful encyclopedia, there are many things that Wikipedia is not. It is not a social-networking site, it is not a free noticeboard, it is not a platform for any kind of advertising or promotion.

Anyone can edit Wikipedia, but if you have come here because you are looking for somewhere to write about yourself, your band, your company, your client, or anything you are closely associated with, this is probably not the site for you. For more explanation, click here (1)

If you would like to help build the encyclopedia, welcome! Click here (2) to create an account.

To leave account creation, click here (3)

Clicking on (1) would go to a single screen which would explain, briefly, the messages in WP:Wikipedia is not about YOU, WP:N and WP:COI. From there, buttons would lead back to the first screen or out. Clicking on (2) would go to the present account creation screen. Button (2) should say "I have read and understood the above", or perhaps there could be a "Terms and Conditions" type check-box for that.

Possible objections:

• It goes against "Anyone can edit". But "anyone can edit" has never meant "anyone can put in whatever they like"; better to explain that early.
• It is elitist, exclusionary and unfriendly. I think it is actually friendlier to turn the Myspacer and the garage-band fan away at the gate than to let them write their articles and then delete them, or even to let them in and then turn them away at the ACW/Article Wizard stage.
• It would turn away people who, after their first attempt is deleted, might learn from that and become productive editors. That is possible, but I think unlikely. Some time ago, while doing NPP, I kept a list of new accounts whose brief autobiographies I had "userfied" - moved to their user pages - while giving them a "Welcome" message and template {{userfy}} or equivalent. Some time later I went back and checked the contributions for 50 of them: none had become long-term editors, and only 3 had made edits on any subject but themselves. A "Myspace" type newbie who is also interested in becoming an encyclopedia editor may become a long-term contributor after submitting his garage-band article and seeing it deleted, but I think he is just as likely to become one if, reading my screen, he decides to drop the idea and sign on anyway.

This could be trialled on an experimental basis - say half of new applicants get the present account creation screen, and half this new one, and we keep track of the results. Note that if fewer people sign on with the new system, that is NOT an indication of failure: the right measures are the percentage of those that sign on who submit acceptable articles, and the percentage who are still editing say three months later.

It may be suggested that we should wait for the results of the ACW. I don't think that is necessary; that is mainly about what happens after account creation, and an IP passing through that gets passed straight to account creation.

Comments and suggestions welcome. If there seems to be support here, I will start an RFC on the idea. We shall have to think carefully how to present this to the WMF; I fear that, like ACTRIAL, it will be seen by them as heresy against "anyone can edit" and the drive to maximise the number of users. As Scottywong suggested above, we should perhaps try to enlist Jimbo's support, and go in at the top.

JohnCD (talk) 22:27, 7 April 2012 (UTC)

Well, I sure agree with the sentiment (well, I did write an essay to that effect) and I do agree that it is friendlier to say "Sorry, wrong address." sooner rather than later, but the actual wording seems to be a little too unwelcoming...

First of all, it is not just "writers" that register. I know - I registered, because I wanted an option "Justify paragraphs" (yes, in Special:Preferences). Thus building the encyclopedia is not the only reason to register.

Second, I'd say that all five pillars could be mentioned. It's not just the ones who are not interested in encyclopedia that should probably go elsewhere - what about the ones "allergic" to NPOV?

Third, in a sense, this text is (for the lack of a better word) written from the project's point of view. I'd say we should write it more like this: "Nice to see you are interested in registering! But before you register, we would like to make sure you are in the right place. Wikipedia is a project to produce a free encyclopedia under 'Five pillars'. It is meant to do little else, but there are many alternative projects. For example, if you are interested in free textbooks, check out Wikibooks, and if you are interested in free news reports, check out Wikinews. But if you are sure you are in the right place, proceed to register.". That is, there is nothing wrong with wanting to participate in a different project and we should emphasise that. --Martynas Patasius (talk) 11:32, 8 April 2012 (UTC)

• Support the idea please rewrite text, it doesn't sound friendly even a bit. Also linking users to complicated rules and guidelines would quickly discourage them from contributing. I think we should do our best to avoid feeding newbies with dozen of hardcore rules. If they do something wrong, fix it Petrb (talk) 11:10, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

my idea for text:

Welcome to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. In order to be a useful encyclopedia, there are few things editors should avoid doing. Please keep in mind that the Wikipedia is not a public noticeboard neither a platform for any kind of advertising or promotion.

Anyone can edit Wikipedia, including you, and you are definitely welcome to do that! But please keep in mind that you should avoid writing about yourself, your band, your company, or anything you are closely related to, in order to keep the information neutral. In case you really need to have an article about that here, you are welcome to request it and someone else will write it for you. For more explanation, click here (1)

Welcome to Wikipedia! Click here (2) to create an account.

So basically you only want something like MediaWiki:Signupend? --Nemo 17:18, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

I absolutely support this idea and initiative - in fact, it's something that comes up fairly often in conversations around the office. What we have, ultimately, is a failure to communicate in clear terms what is most important and we (most importantly, perhaps) fail to do so in a way that will actually be read by anyone.

The text suggestions above are good starts but are still too long by a great degree, I think. Consider working within word budgets: what can you say in 200 words? What can be excised from the text as it sits? "Anyone can edit Wikipedia, including you, and you are definitely welcome to do that!" could easily be rewritten as "Please! Edit Wikipedia!" (which becomes a much stronger call-to-action). "But please keep in mind that you should avoid writing about yourself, your band, your company, or anything you are closely related to, in order to keep the information neutral" could become "Bear in mind that you really can't write about yourself or anything you might have a conflict of interest about", etc. Language can be finessed and A/B tested as well.

I have been working on designs for a help/tutorial system that is centered around two things: being entertaining (you want to read it) and being concise (it's not boring to read). To that end, I've been playing around with various Scott McCloud style "comic strips". (You can see a similar idea with the UploadWizard's copyright comic strip, which has a similar idea but also suffers from what I call "Spock-itis" - over explanation. I've just not had the time or resources to really set down and work on it properly. --Jorm (WMF) (talk) 00:02, 11 April 2012 (UTC)

You know, it is rather strange that we started with idea to send undesirable users away, and ended up with desperate-sounding "Please! Edit Wikipedia!"... --Martynas Patasius (talk) 18:05, 12 April 2012 (UTC)

Strong support, as long as it's moderately terse, somewhat blunt, and retains summary versions of the Five Pillars. --Orange Mike | Talk 20:04, 12 April 2012 (UTC)

Strong support Just observe the feedback dashboard for a while to see some sadly bemused and disillusioned users. A clear explanation in simple English would possibly deter some of the people whose command of English is only just sufficient to follow the Account Creation process, but then flounder. They could become useful contributors later if they were not put off by this initial bad experience.--Harkey (talk) 16:26, 18 April 2012 (UTC)

Motivational badges and user profile tab

I would like to resurrect a discussion about an automatic badge and profile system to keep users motivated to contribute and editors informed about user activity. This is not a barnstar system of editor to editor recognition, but rather a recognition of the users commitment from the site itself, used only to motivate users and keep them contributing. For example, when a new user decides to register an account, they could be automatically welcomed with a new user badge. Users who create their first article that wasn't deleted in x time would also receive a badge thanking them for their contribution. Badges based on milestone edit counts could also be distributed, as well as badges based on areas of participation. This is a system designed to recognize the work of individual contributors, and it can be designed to automatically notify users on their talk page as well as add the badges to an activity feed in a new user page tab called "Profile". This feed would allow users to view badges, edit counts, summaries of contribution histories, and general activity data about each user. Instead of combing through long contribution histories or performing tedious queries on external sites, the badge and profile system would keep a user motivated through site recognition and easily informed about their activity, and allow other editors to quickly view their site statistics and performance. Viriditas (talk) 03:06, 13 April 2012 (UTC)

• Oppose current terminology - the terms "profile" and "badge" can easily entice new users into thinking this is Facebook, and I also need more specifics about what would be the badges.--Jasper Deng (talk) 03:10, 13 April 2012 (UTC)
  • That's like opposing a search function because this isn't Google. Yes, Facebook made it popular, but it has become standardized and users expect it. There are also unique opportunities to use it as a powerful motivational force for new users (who have grown up with Facebook) and with retaining older users. Personally, I would like to see it used to strengthen relationships between editors and encourage research and collaboration. Viriditas (talk) 03:14, 13 April 2012 (UTC)
    • No, we also have to balance it with a focus on the content too. Or, you could start an RfC to change WP:NOTSOCIAL.--Jasper Deng (talk) 03:19, 13 April 2012 (UTC)
      • Content is written by editors often working in collaboration with other editors. We're not machines here. In any case, this is all about viewing the activity of other editors and seeing what type of content area they are active in at the time of the snapshot. This is all about content. Viriditas (talk) 03:27, 13 April 2012 (UTC)
        • Collaboration alone != content. After all, Wikipedia is supposed to be a volunteer community, so things like awards sorta go against that...--Jasper Deng (talk) 03:34, 13 April 2012 (UTC)
          • The badges are motivational tools, not awards. They serve as editor retention tools and reinforce confidence. They also allow other users to briefly review the profile of the user in visual form. We already use them throughout this site in other forms, such as userboxes, user categories, and barnstars. This is a proposal for a coordinated, automated delivery system that would notify a user and update a new profile tab for other users to view. Everything I'm talking about is already in place, it's just a matter of changing the way we deliver and view the data. Viriditas (talk) 09:56, 13 April 2012 (UTC)
            • I'm still not convinced how this would motivate users.--Jasper Deng (talk) 19:46, 13 April 2012 (UTC)
              • What motivates users now? Viriditas (talk) 09:53, 14 April 2012 (UTC)
                • Simply the pleasure of being a contributor to the world's biggest encyclopedia. Not that that's relevant - if this proposal does not motivate users I do not support it.--Jasper Deng (talk) 00:12, 17 April 2012 (UTC)
• I get an achievement for completing a quest in World of Warcraft. That doesn't make it meaningful, nor would handing achievements out for trivial things like registering an account be of value either. Wikipedia is not a social networking site, nor is it a video game. Resolute 03:22, 13 April 2012 (UTC)
  • What is meaningful about barnstars? What is meaningful about welcoming new users and editor retention? What is meaningful about viewing activity feeds and knowing which content area an editor is currently working in? Note, none of those things turn it into a social networking site. Just because we can search Wikipedia for topics, doesn't make it a search index. And just because I can contact a user on their talk page, doesn't make it an e-mail or IM client. You can incorporate useful applications into every area of the site without calling it a social network just because Facebook might use the same functions but for different reasons. Baby, bathwater, forest, trees... Viriditas (talk) 03:27, 13 April 2012 (UTC)
    • Yeah, but our features are primitive enough so as to not distract.--Jasper Deng (talk) 03:34, 13 April 2012 (UTC)
      • Actually, that is not true. We need to take the data feeds we already have and make them more efficient. As a user, I want a way to compose and edit articles and consult other interested editors during the process. Wikipedia has no unified, coordinated system for allowing this to happen. When you review the site, you find these features exist independently, but they aren't connected together in a useful way. If I want to find a user in real-time, the only recourse I have is to use a noticeboard and watch paint dry, or add a template like {{help me}} to my talk page and pray to the spaghetti monster that somebody is monitoring Category:Wikipedians looking for help, or I can fire up IRC, which isn't part of this site, or finally, I can browse through Wikipedia:Highly Active Users and waste another five minutes. This is highly inefficient and slows down my job as an editor. If we use the popular activity feed model, we can not only view what users are doing in real-time, we can connect those users together and allow them to work more efficiently by categorizing users by feeds. That's how many editors currently use the recent changes and watchlist model, but the data output in any watchlist page view is highly distracting, as it doesn't allow us to simplify the view and extract what we are looking for in the first place. And every user should have a profile page that gives us contribution statistics; instead, we have to use external sites to even find this data. The whole thing is distracting. Think about how much time it takes to pour through the contributions of an editor looking for something when a profile page will show you the last 20 edits, the most edited pages and projects, and any GA/FA/DYK's they have worked on. That we don't already have this is ridiculous. Viriditas (talk) 09:56, 13 April 2012 (UTC)
        • • I disagree - people shouldn't be wasting time going through another user's contribs, they should be working on content.--Jasper Deng (talk) 19:46, 13 April 2012 (UTC)
            • In other words, you've ignored everything I've said because YOUDONTLIKEIT. The contribution statistics tell us about the interests of an editor and allow us to collaborate in real time. Let's say I'm working on formatting a reference section for GA. I run into a little snag with double quotes; it appears that the title of a book uses quotes, but so does the template, making the title appear with quotes within quotes. With the system in place that I'm talking about, all I have to do is right-click on the "References" heading, and a drop-down menu appears, "Request help with references"? I click it, and a list of users categorized as specialists in references floats in front of me, all of them active, online, and waiting to respond. Without switching to a talk page or outside the window, I click on a user and a box opens up, starting a messaging window that, depending on how the user configures it, will automatically post a request for help on their talk page, or start a real-time chat using an external program. This is just an example of what I'm talking about. One could also assign rights to users to use this app, so that anyone who abuses it could be easily dealt with. This doesn't turn Wikipedia into Facebook, it merely brings it into 2012, where we already should be. With such a system in place, we could churn out dozens of GA/FA's a day, with editors from multiple projects drawing on special talents and expertise that they would otherwise have to wait hours to days to get a response about on talk pages and noticeboards. The bottom line for me, is that there is a lot of underutilized talent and resources that can be used more efficiently, allowing us to work on creating and adding new projects and new ideas. Viriditas (talk) 09:50, 14 April 2012 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Archive 83#Awarding new users for trivial behavior, Wikipedia:Village pump (idea lab)/Archive 7#Implement an incentive mechanism for prolific editors and Wikipedia:Village pump (idea lab)#Award bot ([10]) for something similar. It would be a good idea to answer all the counterarguments given there...

Oh, and one more thing: when do you "want to find a user in real-time"? What are you trying to do, that requires such "speedy help"? Maybe, if we knew that, we would come up with something..? --Martynas Patasius (talk) 17:58, 13 April 2012 (UTC)

• Oppose - Adding a badge (or achievement or trophy or whatever you want to call it) system merely guarantees you are going to create gaming of that system. As a relatively apposite example, Little Big Planet instituted a series of trophies on release, many of which were based on how many ratings you'd get from other people for your created levels, how many people played them, etc. This led to an unrelenting shit-flood of levels that were created not in order to try things out or create something good, but in order to hit the absolute bare minimum required to get the relevant trophy. On top of that the system is gamed by people specifically saying "you give me a heart and I'll give you one" in order to get those trophies, thus devaluing the achievements of those who actually worked hard to get trophies. The various baubles which already exist--GA, FA, etc--are more than enough recognition, as they focus solely on content and are the result of processes that are hard--though not impossible, as we have seen--to game. → ROUX ₪ 19:54, 13 April 2012 (UTC)
  
  • While gaming and game theory are popular paradigms with youth culture and certain disciplines, they are not the only ones used to explain how Wikipedia works. Many users do not treat Wikipedia as a game at all, and are here to share and learn, not accumulate trophies or user rights. Media and educational paradigms are far more relevant to Wikipedia than gaming. Already existing recognition would be merged into this automatic system based on certain criteria, allowing people who view your profile to see which GA/FA/DYK's you've been active in. Viriditas (talk) 09:37, 14 April 2012 (UTC)
• Oppose - Under the badge system, if I see a page with two spelling mistakes, you can bet that will be two separate edits. Kiltpin (talk) 00:43, 14 April 2012 (UTC)
  • A badge system is used to encourage participation and to recognize user efforts. Viriditas (talk) 09:37, 14 April 2012 (UTC)
• Strong oppose - "User profile tab"? We aren't a social network. "Badges"? Aren't barnstars good enough? We probably even have too many barnstars :/  Hazard-SJ  ㋡  03:36, 14 April 2012 (UTC)
  • "We aren't a social network" is a thought-terminating cliché and entirely false. Wikis are classified as a social networking technology, and that's a fact. However, that doesn't mean Wikipedia is Facebook. That you can't tell the difference between the two statements is your problem. Viriditas (talk) 09:37, 14 April 2012 (UTC)
    • No. We are a free encyclopedia-developing group that is currently using a wiki. We didn't start with a Wiki and may later migrate away from using one (or just completely change the meaning of wiki). The wiki is only the means to the end. Rmhermen (talk) 14:23, 14 April 2012 (UTC)
      • In my opinion, you've got it backwards. It is not the meaning of a wiki that will change but the very old concept of a static print encyclopedia that has changed. Wikipedia is being used in entirely novel ways, as a locative media delivery system for AR devices to primitive adaptive learning engines that are still in their infancy. Trying to force Wikipedia to remain within the antiquated paradigm of an ancient print encyclopedia is like hitching an airplane to a horse and wagon to get from New York to Los Angeles. Viriditas (talk) 21:41, 14 April 2012 (UTC)
• Comment – I don't think that having a system of motivations is necessarily bad. But perhaps they shouldn't be easy to come by. Maybe a simple system of award points leading up to a meaningful recognition status? I've seen systems where the "title" of an editor changes as they make contributions, going from equivalent of newbie up to experienced veteran and beyond. The distributed proofreaders site lists the rank of a page proofer relative to their peers, which can provide some motivation for the competitive among us. Maybe one could even win belts in wiki-fu? But at some point it might make sense to reach an ultimate limit where one has "mastered" the art and no longer needs automated awards.

Automating the process seems feasible, but it would need to be somewhat proofed against attempts to "game" the system merely to increase ones perceived prestige. The drawback is that developing this system would draw away from other efforts to improve and automate Wikipedia. Regards, RJH (talk) 16:26, 14 April 2012 (UTC)

• Badges? We don't need no stinking badges!! – Anyways, perhaps we should reassess the barnstar system if we want to head in that direction, but, while some dispute that "Wikipedia is not a social network", also keep in mind that Wikipedia is not an MMORPG, and we shouldn't be trying to structure it like one if we can help it. --MuZemike 20:00, 15 April 2012 (UTC)
  • This continuing concern with gaming the badges appears to be a huge misunderstanding of how they would be used. On the one hand, motivational badges are equivalent to "thank you notes" that would be added automatically to a profile page. If any editor wants to try and "game" such a system, I say let them. Most people will acknowledge the thanks and move on. That we have a very small minority of editors who will waste their time trying to accumulate motivational tools misses the point. The point is to motivate users to contribute. As for the GA/FA/DYK badges, those should also be added automatically based on a flag set by the closing reviewers. I realize that many editors here are concerned with so-called "gaming" but such a concern seems entirely out of proportion to the potential benefits. We know for a fact that people treat RL as a game, so if they want to treat Wikipedia like a game as well, there's nothing stopping them. I'm here to share information and learn from others. I have little to no interest in accumulating trophies, awards, or recognition. Viriditas (talk) 08:32, 16 April 2012 (UTC)

• Strong support That can help Wikipedia retaining long-term contributors. -- Toshio Yamaguchi (tlk−ctb) 15:51, 16 April 2012 (UTC)

• I hate automated thanks. It's cheese, except it ain't even edible. Bloody loathe 'achievements' in games, too. Just irritating when they pop up, interrupting the gameplay and detracting from the entire point of the thing. Stats, on the other hand, can be fun, but we already have those... am I just being cranky, though, or is this a more shared sentiment? — Isarra ༆ 19:51, 16 April 2012 (UTC)

• Unsure Perhaps it could be made an option that would be deactivated by default and could be activated in the preferences? Reading some of the comments I am no longer sure whether it really would be a good idea. Personally I also wouldn't be interested in receiving those, as they would be of no personal value for me. -- Toshio Yamaguchi (tlk−ctb) 20:18, 16 April 2012 (UTC)

• Oppose. An automated badge system? Based on which statistics? Edit count you say? Participation in certain areas? Who sets the milestones in the latter other than humans, for which we already have our working barnstars system? For the former, you completely underestimate the number of editors already suffering of editcountitis when you think that there will be only "a very small minority of editors who will waste their time trying to accumulate motivational tools". We should assess a user's contributions based on their quality, not their quantity. Which is something that can only be done manually. Something we already have, both in the form of barnstars and FA and GA trophies. Improving editor motivation is good, but not this way. Nageh (talk) 20:38, 16 April 2012 (UTC)
  • Misintrepretation and misreading do not an opposition make. Thanking a new editor for their recent contributions is not an assessment; it's a motivational tool. Thanking an editor with 100k+ edits is not an assessment, it's a sign of appreciation. Just as fine bottles of wine aren't made for alcoholics, thank you badges aren't intended for people playing Wikipedia as a game or suffering under the delusion that collecting thank you notes means they are better editors. I haven't underestimated the number of editors who aren't registering and who are leaving because Wikipedia doesn't show any sign of welcoming, appreciation, or gratitude. That you think this has anything to do with assessing contributions tells me you don't care. Keep treating editors like machines and keep eliminating the human touch and see where that gets you. And, barnstars are not "trophies". That some editors use them that way is their choice. They are simply signs of appreciation, and have the same motivational intent. You haven't shown any downside here, other than a cold shoulder to forgotten and unappreciated editors laboring here without any recognition from the machine. The solution is to make the machine more human, not less. Viriditas (talk) 00:06, 17 April 2012 (UTC)
    • • Just speak for yourself, Viriditas. So far I have welcome every new editor I ran across, often with personal messages (rather than just prefabricated Twinkle ones), and I have thanked each and every editor for particularly constructive contributions to articles in my area. That is what an automated system can never do. (Feel free to check my edits.) Nageh (talk) 13:31, 18 April 2012 (UTC)
    • Viriditas, a machine can never be a 100% human. Only human editors can give true appreciation.--Jasper Deng (talk) 00:12, 17 April 2012 (UTC)
      • Human-computer interaction is about recognizing human input and making it more usable for human users. Usability is enhanced when the interface between the user and the computer becomes more natural, i.e. human. There are thousands of users who have not received appreciation from other people for their contributions. Allowing the machine to recognize their efforts is a human endeavor. Viriditas (talk) 00:51, 17 April 2012 (UTC)
        • Machines are not intelligent, there have been huge projects attempting to prove the opposite. I may support an official barnstar policy regarding something orientated at that, but I'm not budging from my view here.--Jasper Deng (talk) 00:55, 17 April 2012 (UTC)
          • This topic is about the interaction between humans and machines, not intelligence, which is probably an emergent phenomenon separate from this discussion. Viriditas (talk) 00:59, 17 April 2012 (UTC)

I don't think automatic badges will ever make a lot of sense for us, because Wikimedia is so much about collaboration with other people, and recognition through the observation of high quality work by others.

However, I do believe it's very much worth keeping an open mind regarding the idea of badges awarded by other people, as a slightly more structured, better-supported alternative to barnstars and various other awards currently informally given. Mozilla has developed an Open Badges framework, and m:Badges has some initial thoughts on the application of badges in the Wikimedia context.

In a nutshell, badges given from one user to another (or through some consensus-based group process) could be a useful way to recognize accomplishments, and to take this recognition from one wiki to another. So, if you've proven that you're great at restoring pictures using PhotoShop, you'd be able to take that form of recognition to any wiki you're contributing to. Obviously there's a lot more to it than that, but IMO an intelligent badges implementation to recognize skills and quality contributions, not automatic "achievements", could be very interesting.--Eloquence* 23:56, 17 April 2012 (UTC)

• Comment/Very Weak Support While I strongly agree that our focus here should be on the creation and improvement of content, a little more interaction would be a good thing. I've been editing on WP for . . . 3 or 4 years now, not active all the time, but on and off. In that time I have had very little contact with other editors. Its only been the past week or so I decided that I would make the effort to get involved in community discussions as opposed to just editing content. That is not to say I don't care about WP as a whole, but rather that I did not feel that other editors cared about me, so I really didn't care overly much about them. I was going to do my self-designed job and that was it. Is this really a positive mindset for WP editors to have? I don't think so. I think that membership in a community is something that needs to be fostered more. Being an editor is not something that is easy to walk into, yet we claim to want more and more people to be editors, so then something must be done to rope them into the community. Do I think shiny little welcome badges are the answer? Probably not- but I think this discussion needs to happen- if you don't want automated badges, then what is a better solution?

Display a diff of the text near the list of edits in watchlists and RCP

I have a sneaky feeling that this is already implemented somewhere or that it was proposed and shot down some time back, but here goes... When a user or RC patroller has to examine an edit, each page has to be loaded individually. For the vast majority of the edits,around 500-1000 bytes of the text containing the "improved diff" (the one that comes in wiki-ed with the color coding of deleted text) will be sufficient to determine if the edit is good or not. Here is an example of what I imagined in the list of recent changes/watchlist.

12:59 Climate of Mumbai‎ (diff | hist) . . (+7)‎ . . 117.204.168.105 (talk) (→‎May: )(===May=== May is the hottest month of the year for Mumbai with the cool sea breezes providing some relief. This means daily maximum hovers around 33.358412542485 °C and also means that the daily low is 26.1 °C.<ref name="IMD" />)

This could be cached for 48 hrs (<1GB taking 1KB/diff and <500,000 edts per day) if generating the diff is expensive. Might greatly speedup rc patrol. Thanks. Staticd (talk) 09:46, 15 April 2012 (UTC)

And Scientists say this year temperatures can soar up to 37° in summer--Al Sheik!Woiu!I do not fish! (talk) 16:48, 18 April 2012 (UTC)

The BIG deletion / editor retention proposal thread

Here's a series of proposals designed to improve quality AND improve editor retention. Most of these work together.

These ideas aren't perfect, no, far from it. But they are a start and may help with quality AND editor retention. I encourage everybody else to add their ideas to this thread. I especially encourage editors from the WMF to add their thoughts. Thanks for taking the time to read this. 64.40.60.152 (talk) 12:48, 29 March 2012 (UTC)

Background

Deletion on Wikipedia is not deletion. It's hiding things from people.

Type	Notes
Everything	Our core developers can see everything inside the database and stuff that's outside the database.
Oversighted	Hidden from everybody except Oversighters and the above.
Deleted	Hidden from everybody except admins and the above
Nothing implemented so far	Hidden from everybody except registered users and the above.
NOINDEX	Only hidden from search engines. This is used on many thousands of non-notable articles in user space, the WP:INCUBATOR and in WP:AFC.

We can take advantage this idea of deletion as hiding things to fill in the gap above to make us more efficient and improve editor retention.

Proposal 1: Create a "hidden" article namespace

There are thousands and thousands of non-notable articles are spread all over Wikipedia in user sandboxes, the WP:INCUBATOR and WP:AFC. These have been sitting around for years, so it's obvious they do no harm. Why? Because nobody sees them. They are hidden (i.e. deleted from search engines) using NOINDEX.

Expand this idea by combining the WP:INCUBATOR and WP:AFC, we create a new "hidden article" namespace. This namespace would only be viewable by registered users that are currently logged in. This way the entire rest of the world, as well as search engines, would not be able to see the articles it contains. The namespace could be called Under construction to be friendly to new users.

PLEASE NOTE: We would use our current deletion system solely for things with legal implications, like attack pages, copyright violations and related things.

There would be a flag so that the same article title could not be created in both namespaces (i.e. if an article exists in one namespace it could not be created in the other). Search results for registered users would include the hidden article name space while search results for unregistered users would not.

The hidden article space (a kind of "soft-deleted article" space for non-notable but verifiable content) would be like Wikipedia of the past, where articles could develop slowly over time and it would provide a safe haven for new users and their creations while they learned our rules. This is kind of an upside-down version of several different WP:PEREN proposals, most similar to this one. 64.40.60.152 (talk) 12:48, 29 March 2012 (UTC)

I took the liberty to rename the "deleted article" to "hidden article" in the proposal above to better represent the intended usage; "deleted article" is a loaded word at Wikipedia since it has legal implications. Diego (talk) 14:01, 2 April 2012 (UTC)

Support

1. Support as proposer. 64.40.60.152 (talk) 12:48, 29 March 2012 (UTC)
2. Extreme utterly overwhelming support. Automatic userfication has a number of benefits over on-demand userfication, and no drawbacks (any deleted article can be userfied anyway). This proposal has no new risks and allows verifiable content to be retrieved for reuse at other articles; it should be extended to all readers -not only registered ones- so that anyone can edit the content that is not notable but it's still allowed by WP:V. Though, only articles deleted through AfDs should be placed at this new space to ensure that they don't have Copivio or BLP problems. Diego (talk) 13:41, 2 April 2012 (UTC)

   The benefits for automatic userfication are at least the following:

   • Any editor can reasess the reason for which the article was deleted, years after its deletion.
   • Any editor can reuse verifiable content and references from the article, years after its deletion.
   • Any editor can check whether there's interesting content in the article history. This currently can't be done for deleted articles or those copied to Deletionpedia.
   • It reduces the workload of admins who currently have to assess and perform requests for userfications one by one.
   • It doesn't require an admin to userfy the content, so the benefits above can be exercised instantly without human intervention. Anyone who opposes sayng "but you can retrieve the content by asking an admin" are missing the point - the burocratic barrier of an admin request is a steep requirement that reduces the number of articles that can be accessed in that way, and thus harms the usual wiki process as most articles in that situation won't be reviewed.

   Diego (talk) 13:53, 2 April 2012 (UTC)

3. Support. This is a more orderly implementation of the incubator and userfication. The more general point is that Wikipedia deletes things when there is no need to conceal the history. There's no reason why any random non-admin editor can't take a new article and Move it straight to the user's userspace with no admin intervention at all, nor why an AfD needs to order anything more than this in most cases. But an "in construction" namespace gives people a more standard way to move it, makes it easier to find and collaborate on the article, and encourages development of a more standard point at which it is moved back to mainspace. Wnt (talk) 18:50, 3 April 2012 (UTC)

Oppose

• This proposal, and the one below it about a "view-deleted" user right, will both never happen. The idea of allowing non-admins to have access to deleted material has been explicitly vetoed by the Wikimedia foundation, [11]. Which actually I guess pretty much kills all of your proposals actually except the one about combining AFD and DRV. --Jac16888 ^Talk 12:58, 29 March 2012 (UTC)

• Oppose Editor retention is not to come at the expense of the quality of Wikipedia. The reasib anyone wants to come here is because we have the reputation for being good; any proposal which sacrifices overall quality in the name of editor retention will literally cause both to fail: no one will want to come here because the quality will fail. --Jayron32 13:45, 29 March 2012 (UTC)

• Oppose. Deletion on Wikipedia is deletion. Sysops are given the right to review deleted material for various technical and legal reasons. But these are deleted entries as decided by the community. PRODs/AfDs are given a week and this is enough time to either demonstrate that an article passes WP:GNG or doesn't (plus a few IAR cases). Potentially useful articles not ready by then can be userfied. Everything else is unsuitable for the encyclopedia and keeping it available won't really serve any purpose except encouraging misuse. The editors have to accept our notability criteria and guidelines; "keeping" their deleted article does nothing for the actual article quality. —  HELLKNOWZ  ▎TALK 15:42, 29 March 2012 (UTC)

• Oppose: per above, plus, there's already a site called Deletionpedia that retains deleted articles from Wikipedia. Whenaxis (contribs) ^{DR goes to Wikimania!} 22:57, 29 March 2012 (UTC)
• Oppose --Guerillero | My Talk 14:03, 16 April 2012 (UTC)

Discussion

Comment I quite like this idea and the other associated with it. I think it would be good to deminish the negativity associated with deletions, especially for articles which do not have legal issues and which are in any way potentially notable (leaving it to the de/promotion proces to see whether notability can, indeed, be verified). However, as you yourself pointed out, there have been quite some proposals which are somewhat alike this. I think it would be wise to make an inventarisation of why those were not accepted and give detailed explainations as of why your proposal overcomes the objections. Furthermore, I would start with a debate concerning the general idea of having a work-in-progress namespace and using a de/promotion proces instead of a delation proces. You/we do not need to go into technical details concerning rights, or for example the relation with article creation by new users (e.g. relation to article creation wizard). And, considering that it is an idea with far-fetching consequences, I think might be wise to create a seperate RfC thread instead of creating this potentially huge thread.

In summary: (possibly) good idea, but start with the general idea and not the technical details. JHS_nl (talk) 13:16, 29 March 2012 (UTC)

• We should be using NoIndex on new pages until they've been patrolled, but that's under discussion in a separate RFC. The wiki is about collaborative editing, and currently that works best in mainspace. ϢereSpielChequers 08:03, 30 March 2012 (UTC)

As a reply to all the Oppose not-votes, this proposal is not equivalent to the perennial requests for universal access to deletion. It's essentailly equivalent to a default userfication for every deleted article, except for cases where userfication would be explicitly denied for legal concerns. The benefit is that it doesn't remove the page from the Wiki process and thus removes an artificial barrier to edit that the WMF created only for legal-risk-prone content, but which was extended without reason to other types of content where it doesn't provide any benefit. The [Wikimedia foundation Wikimedia foundation veto] of free access to deleted space was only addressed to content with potential legal problems, but that content would be explicitly curated from inclusion at the new "automatic-userfication" space if only content from AfDs is placed there. Diego (talk) 13:41, 2 April 2012 (UTC)

• I agree this is not the same as viewing all deleted articles.
• Saying that a week is long enough for a PROD? That's an example of the problem. Some person who is not a career Wikipedian doesn't log in for a week, months after he started an article, and now he's got to beg an admin to try and fix whatever was wrong with his article? Perhaps only to get mocked because it violated a few of the thousand policies and guidelines he doesn't know? That's not enough time for new editors we want to recruit to be able to respond to one person who didn't like their work. Wnt (talk) 18:57, 3 April 2012 (UTC)

Proposal 2: Create a deleted article user right

Create a new user right to move articles in to and out of the deleted article space. This could be given to users who can show an understanding of notability AND have referenced a few articles. Users with this right could go around cleaning up Wikipedia by simply moving articles in to the new deleted article space by PRODing them and performing the move themselves. They wouldn't have go through WP:AFD as these people will be trusted users. Users who violate that trust would lose the right. 64.40.60.152 (talk) 12:48, 29 March 2012 (UTC)

Support

1. Support as proposer. 64.40.60.152 (talk) 12:48, 29 March 2012 (UTC)
2. Some support. Admittedly, people with this right are "as good as admins". Nonetheless, I believe Wikipedia should experiment with a la carte adminship, people with the userright to view deleted articles or the userright to protect and unprotect articles or the userright to block users, but not all three, as a potential transition stage to adminship that might have somewhat lower RfA standards to alleviate the shortage. Wnt (talk) 19:00, 3 April 2012 (UTC)

Oppose 2

• Oppose Become an admin if you need to read deleted articles. If RFA is too onerous, fix it. --Jayron32 13:46, 29 March 2012 (UTC)
• Oppose: per above. What's the rationale behind this? Whenaxis (contribs) ^{DR goes to Wikimania!} 22:57, 29 March 2012 (UTC)
• Oppose this is an unnecessarily bitey proposal. If someone can be trusted to reject other editors work they should become an admin. ϢereSpielChequers 08:17, 30 March 2012 (UTC)

Discussion

• We could achieve the best part of this in a very non-bitey way by allowing registered editors private space in userspace. Userpages and usertalk would still be viewable by all, but if we allowed editors to set subpages in their userspace as either private or public then we would have a simple to understand way to work on drafts and also to decide whether to open a user page to collaboration. Serverspace is now so cheap that we shouldn't worry about the odd gb of clutter we are storing for free - its far cheaper to keep it than go through it. For long dormant users it would be quite non-bitey if an admin could tag old drafts in subpages as private - that way the next time that editor logged on their subpage would still be there, but with a little tab marked "make public". ϢereSpielChequers 08:17, 30 March 2012 (UTC)

Proposal 3: Combine WP:AFD and WP:DRV

Combine WP:AFD and WP:DRV to create Articles for Promotion/Demotion (WP:AFP/D). The new WP:AFP/D would run much in the same way as AFD does now, except that articles would be promoted out of deleted article space OR demoted in to the deleted article space. WP:AFP/D would be used mostly when articles are moved in and out of deleted article space inappropriately or when there is deletion warring. Users with the new deleted article user right could perform most of the closes. Admins would only be needed to close discussion where consensus was difficult to judge.

This form of deletion is a lot less bitey than it is now and should encourage new editors to spend more time working to improve their articles AND at the same time keep article space clean of non-notable articles so the rest of the world never sees them. 64.40.60.152 (talk) 12:48, 29 March 2012 (UTC)

Support

1. Support as proposer. 64.40.60.152 (talk) 12:48, 29 March 2012 (UTC)

Oppose

• This proposal is based on a misunderstanding what wp:DRV does. Even if the other proposals were accepted (which is not going to happen) we would still need a separate DRV when an AFD close is disputed. Yoenit (talk) 13:01, 29 March 2012 (UTC)
• Oppose too confusing since terms like oppose for AFD and DRV, though in same space, would have opposite meaning. RJFJR (talk) 13:38, 29 March 2012 (UTC)
• Oppose: overcomplicates things. What's the rationale behind this, I ask, again? Whenaxis (contribs) ^{DR goes to Wikimania!} 22:57, 29 March 2012 (UTC)
• Oppose: I don't see a point to shuffling the deck chairs here; it's still the same decision making on one board as two. Wnt (talk) 19:02, 3 April 2012 (UTC)

Discussion

Proposal 4: Start new articles in the new space

Have newly created articles start off in the deleted article space. This would ensure that attack pages and copyright violations would never be seen. 64.40.60.152 (talk) 12:48, 29 March 2012 (UTC)

Support

1. Support as proposer. 64.40.60.152 (talk) 12:48, 29 March 2012 (UTC)

Oppose

1. This would be similar to wp:ACTRIAL, which the WMF vetoed, so no chance of passing. Yoenit (talk) 13:04, 29 March 2012 (UTC)
2. Oppose violates AGF. RJFJR (talk) 13:35, 29 March 2012 (UTC)

• Oppose, though only on technical grounds. WP:ACTRIAL was passed by the community overwhelmingly, and the foundation vetoed it. I still believe in my heart that restricting article creation to autoconfirmed users is the best path to improving editor retention as it acts to prevent the bad feelings that come from having your earliest work trashed, but the foundation disagrees fundementally with that, so this proposal stands no chance. --Jayron32 13:49, 29 March 2012 (UTC)
  • On a slightly offhand note, I'd have no qualms about re-proposing WP:ACTRIAL now. It's been 6 months since this veto (or whatever it was) occurred. I'd similarly have no objection to a repeated proposal once every 6 months thereafter. Equazcion ^(talk) 14:41, 29 Mar 2012 (UTC)
• Oppose: per above. Rationale to support? Whenaxis (contribs) ^{DR goes to Wikimania!} 22:57, 29 March 2012 (UTC)
• All articles start as deleted is even worse than the ACTRIAL idea, that "only" had a false positive rate of circa 30%, this would be rather worse as it doesn't seem to be limited to just biting editors who are not yet autoconfirmed. There are ways to improve the new page process, starting all unpatrolled articles as noindex would help and be non-bitey as the authors wouldn't know that their article was being checked first. ϢereSpielChequers 22:46, 30 March 2012 (UTC)
• Oppose. I suppose you have in mind some hypothetical deleted article space that users could still read and edit, but if so, that's an "under construction" space more like the first proposal I support above, and a different deleted article space would still have to exist for new articles that failed the cut, unless the unlikely though admirable perennial proposal for all deleted articles to be made visible would pass. So this is too confused to work with. Wnt (talk) 19:06, 3 April 2012 (UTC)

Discussion

Proposal 5: Separate WP:NPP in to 2 groups

Modify WP:NPP to have two groups. Group 1 would look for articles with legal problems like WP:BLP violations and copyright violations and tag them for speedy deletion by admins. Group 2 would be similar to the users at WP:AFC and they would have the new deleted article user right. They would look for new articles to be promoted out of deleted article space. 64.40.60.152 (talk) 12:48, 29 March 2012 (UTC)

Support

1. Support as proposer. 64.40.60.152 (talk) 12:48, 29 March 2012 (UTC)

Oppose

Oppose: copyright violations and BLP-violations are handled by tags that are placed on violations which are patrolled regularly already. Otherwise, contacting the OTRS team is efficient enough. Whenaxis (contribs) ^{DR goes to Wikimania!} 22:57, 29 March 2012 (UTC)

Oppose: single patrollers working from a single list of articles should be able to find both problems. The key is to have different actions, i.e. one to be deleted entirely, but the other moved to an Under Construction space of whatever variety. Wnt (talk) 19:07, 3 April 2012 (UTC)

• Oppose as Wnt pointed out this isn't related to how NPP works. Remember patrollers are not salaried employees who can be directed at particular tasks, and even if they were how would you identify which are the articles with BLP violations and which are the OK articles? Currently we rely on our newpage patrollers to do that, so before you direct them off to another task you need to explain how else you are going to sift these articles and identify the BLP problem ones. ϢereSpielChequers 21:57, 19 April 2012 (UTC)

Discussion

Proposal: Modify WP:CSD to use the new space

Some of the "G" criteria of WP:CSD would no longer be needed. Exceptions would be G3, G5, G9, G10 and G12. The entire "A" series would be irrelevant and not needed anymore. There would be a few exceptions such as articles created in user space. These exceptions could be handled by users with the new deleted article user right. 64.40.60.152 (talk) 12:48, 29 March 2012 (UTC)

Support

1. Support as proposer. 64.40.60.152 (talk) 12:48, 29 March 2012 (UTC)
2. Strong support. A new space is not even needed, though an Under Construction/Rough Draft type space would be desirable. Things like "patent nonsense" and "test pages" could be userfied right now. Even when that seems like a waste of time, it sets a less hostile tone for the new user, and deleting stuff takes time also. Deletion should be reserved solely for those pages which actually need to be concealed from the public due to some kind of serious issue like copyright.

Oppose

Oppose: Rationale, please? Unnecessary user right. Whenaxis (contribs) ^{DR goes to Wikimania!} 22:57, 29 March 2012 (UTC)

Discussion

Proposal 7: Modify WP:PROD to use the new space

Modify proposed deletion to move articles in to the new deleted article space. This would ease the burden on admins and allow non-admins to delete non-notable articles. 64.40.60.152 (talk) 12:48, 29 March 2012 (UTC)

Support

1. Support as proposer. 64.40.60.152 (talk) 12:48, 29 March 2012 (UTC)

Oppose

1. Oppose: per my #Oppose 6. Whenaxis (contribs) ^{DR goes to Wikimania!} 22:57, 29 March 2012 (UTC)
2. Oppose allowing non-admins to delete non-notable articles. If someone wants the ability to delete other peoples work then they should go through RFA. ϢereSpielChequers 22:37, 30 March 2012 (UTC)
3. Support and Oppose. A "prod" should not lead to article deletion, but only to rough draft status. However, this should be distinct from true deleted status. "Prod" should not be used for things like copyright and defamation issues; that should go to deletion - having prods point to a space for draft articles makes this distinction much more important, however. Wnt (talk) 19:31, 3 April 2012 (UTC)

Discussion

Proposal 8: Define tagging for deleted article space

All articles in deleted article space would have a notice that can't be removed, stating something like this

An additional set of tags would be used on the talk page, but they would look like regular messages rather than the scary boxes. They would have canned messages similar to GA checklists with little check marks to tick. The canned messages would be simplified versions of WP:GNG, WP:V and WP:RS with links to the full policies. Once the check marks are all ticked, it would add the article to a promote category that Group 2 NPPers would watch. They'd come by and promote the article out of deleted article space. 64.40.60.152 (talk) 12:48, 29 March 2012 (UTC)

Support

1. Support as proposer. 64.40.60.152 (talk) 12:48, 29 March 2012 (UTC)
2. Support, pending details. A more consistent and collaborative handling of draft articles is good, and such tags are part of it. The exact nature of the checklist, I'm not so sure about; I think it may only be feasible as some canned advice, and even then it could quickly become overbearing. (when I say that, I'm thinking of that first page from the new file upload wizard... I must have looked at it ten times before I found the box to proceed from it) Wnt (talk) 19:34, 3 April 2012 (UTC)

Oppose

Oppose: The creator of a page can already ask an admin to e-mail a copy of the article to them and allow them to improve it within their own user space. Whenaxis (contribs) ^{DR goes to Wikimania!} 22:57, 29 March 2012 (UTC)

This additional request step is harmful to the wiki edit process, as only people who knew the content before it was deleted will be able to request an admin for undeletion. The idea of Wikipedia is that anyone can improve the work of others; this proposal is intended to extend the possibility to review and reuse deleted content to people that didn't see it before it was deleted. Diego (talk) 13:45, 2 April 2012 (UTC)

Discussion

Proposal 9: Deprecate userfication of articles

Userfication of articles would no longer be needed as any article that would be userfied would now be put on deleted article space. User space could be kept clean of non-notable articles. This would also allow experienced editors to collaborate with new users on their new articles in a way that's not as easy in user space. 64.40.60.152 (talk) 12:48, 29 March 2012 (UTC)

Support

1. Support as proposer. 64.40.60.152 (talk) 12:48, 29 March 2012 (UTC)

Oppose

Oppose: deleted article is an unnnecessary namespace. Whenaxis (contribs) ^{DR goes to Wikimania!} 22:57, 29 March 2012 (UTC)

Oppose. Allowing userspace drafts when people desire it would allow them to avoid collaboration when they're not looking for it, without having to keep the content totally offline, where I'm afraid it might not ever find its way back to us. Wnt (talk) 19:37, 3 April 2012 (UTC)

Discussion

Proposal 10: A no-consensus solution

I think that a draft article namespace (what some are calling "deleted article namespace" above) is a great idea. But I think we're going to have a hard time pushing it through. So let's focus on a solution that requires no consensus policy decisions but accomplishes the goal for those willing to pursue it.

• Definition of deletion. The sole purpose of deletion (speedy, AfD, or RevDel) is to deny access to the page history. Any page can be blanked or greatly reduced by normal editing. Any page can be chosen to be maintained in a reduced form by some kind of consensus discussion. Any page can be protected from editing by an admin. All these things - blanking/reduction, protection ("salting"), consensus determination - are sometimes confounded with deletion, as they may be done during the AfD process. But the only time when deletion is needed is when there is something so worrisome in the history, like a copyright violation (not just Fair Use) or defamation (not just quoting the wrong sources) that it is judged necessary for admins to conceal it. For us to realize this is the first step toward reform.

• Do not delete incomplete new articles, but userfy them. If an article lacks copyright, defamation, or such history-concealment issues, don't attach a prod, don't ask for speedy deletion, don't propose for deletion - if you think an article is substandard, leave a talk message for the editor, and if the concern isn't addressed, move the article to the user's userspace (User:Soandso/My Not So Great Article). If the user disagrees with this, the issue becomes a contested move rather than a contested deletion, but otherwise much resembles AfD discussion.

• Index userspace drafts. We should have a real "rough draft" userspace, but we don't. So let's start a category, Category:Userspace draft articles, and put these articles into it, perhaps as part of an associated template, complete with subcategories. Let's make some navigable pages to make up for a lack of a separate namespace. Once we have a namespace de facto, maybe we'll get one technically also.

Support

• Wnt (talk) 20:00, 3 April 2012 (UTC) (proposed)
• Support. We should find a new name to distinguish several degrees of removed articles, since "deletion" is a loaded term in which all the actions you describe are mixed as a whole. I propose "redlink" or "redlinked deletion" for denied access to the page history. "Soft deletion" is already understood as a way to delete articles without hiding its history, so both terms are enough to differenciate the different outcomes. If this proposal #10 gets consensus we should change the Wikipedia:Deletion process and Wikipedia:Proposed deletion guidelines to recommend the process you described for soft deletion. If not - well, the good thing of this proposal is that it can be used without consensus. Diego (talk) 15:34, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

Oppose

• Oppose - So, instead of trying to actually get policy changed, you want to just do an end-run around it? — The Hand That Feeds You:^Bite 20:46, 10 April 2012 (UTC)
• Oppose partly because articles belong in mainspace, as that's where they will attract the collaborative editing that improves them. But mainly because userfying and moving articles out of mainspace is a way of rejecting articles, and possibly just as bitey a way as deleting them. Maybe more bitey as deletion is usually supposed to be because the subject isn't important enough for us to want an article. Rejecting stuff as poorly written and userfying it is rather like deletion, except it doesn't need admin rights. I'd be slightly less worried if only admins were doing this, but I still think the risks would be excessive. ϢereSpielChequers 21:47, 19 April 2012 (UTC)

Discuss

Why does the "my sandbox" link go to an edit page?

I just noticed that there is now a "My sandbox" link at the top of the page, which is nice, but I don't understand why it automatically takes me to the edit page rather than the page itself. The discussion that I saw about this a few months ago didn't agree do to that. I guess when I'm going to my sandbox I'm usually going there to make an edit, but the same is true for many pages, so it seems odd that this one link goes to an edit screen rather than the page itself. It looks like the URL is also trying to preload a template, but I don't see anything new added to the page. —Arctic Gnome (talk • contribs) 04:38, 16 April 2012 (UTC)

Any time that you navigate to a page which has not been created yet you'll be presented with the edit box.
— V = IR (Talk • Contribs) 05:12, 16 April 2012 (UTC)

The "my sandbox" link actually always goes straight to editing, whether it exists or not. Equazcion ^(talk) 05:21, 16 Apr 2012 (UTC)

The template it's preloading is not edited into the sandbox page, but appears as a notice on top of the edit box. It's the box that says "this is the sandbox of user ___ etc". Equazcion ^(talk) 05:23, 16 Apr 2012 (UTC)

Humm... I mist be missing something new. Where is the "My sandbox" link, anyway? I have one set up on my user page, but I gather that you guys are talking about something in the interface?
— V = IR (Talk • Contribs) 05:25, 16 April 2012 (UTC)

Yes, it's up top next to preferences. Equazcion ^(talk) 05:27, 16 Apr 2012 (UTC)

huh, I didn't even see that. Someone, somewhere, obviously added that to the interface. There's a MediaWiki namespace page around here somewhere for this kind of thing... I'll have to find it. Incidentally, the url attached to the link does have action=edit hard coded into it (along with a preloaded template, if the page is empty).
— V = IR (Talk • Contribs) 05:39, 16 April 2012 (UTC)

I'm guessing it was done that way to make editing more obvious to newbies who might not have found/been courageous enough to use the edit tab yet. I don't really have any strong feelings on whether that should change. Equazcion ^(talk) 05:43, 16 Apr 2012 (UTC)

If they never made a sandbox it will default to the edit page anyway, and I don't think that the notice is important enough to make the link go to the edit page for all of us. —Arctic Gnome (talk • contribs) 07:23, 16 April 2012 (UTC)

How do you turn this nonsense off? I already have a sandbox page at User:Spinningspark/Sandbox (and a link ot it). Having another one at User:Spinningspark/sandbox with something different in it is just downright confusing and taking up valuable button space at the top of the page. SpinningSpark 12:42, 16 April 2012 (UTC)

Special:Preferences -> Gadgets (Appearance) -> Uncheck "Add a "my sandbox" link to the personal toolbar area." Worm^TT · (talk) 12:46, 16 April 2012 (UTC)

I was about to say that. Okay, just so I get credit for something, Worm, here's an easier way to offer preferences instructions: {{myprefs|9|Add a "my sandbox" link to the personal toolbar area.}}

Produces: Preferences → Gadgets → Add a "my sandbox" link to the personal toolbar area. Equazcion ^(talk) 12:51, 16 Apr 2012 (UTC)

For whoever's interested, I made a little script to change the sandbox link so it won't go straight to edit, nor preload a template: User:Equazcion/NoEditSandbox.js. Equazcion ^(talk) 13:09, 16 Apr 2012 (UTC)

Anyone want to check out the obvious Help:My sandbox? ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 02:07, 20 April 2012 (UTC)

Navigating Wikipedia's help is anything but obvious. Plus my way's easier :) Equazcion ^(talk) 02:23, 20 Apr 2012 (UTC)

Wikitravel

Please note the RfC and Sue Gardner's comment on establishing a Wiki Travel Guide as Wikimedia project: meta:Talk:Wiki Travel Guide#RfC regarding "Travel_Wiki_Guide" --Manuel Schneider^(bla) (+/-) 12:17, 19 April 2012 (UTC)

Progress-Mir collision

I propose two articles, the first one about Progress M-24 collision with Mir and the second about the Progress M-34 collision with Mir 1997 which resulted in 70% depressurization of the Spektr Module

These are the name for the proposed articles

Article No 1: 1994 Progress-Mir collision Article No 2: 1997 Mir Depressurization collision

Hope you support the proposals. Regards--Monareal (talk) 16:46, 14 April 2012 (UTC)

Hey, you're dead?--Al Sheik!Woiu!I do not fish! (talk) 13:22, 18 April 2012 (UTC)

No man has ever replied!.--Al Sheik!Woiu!I do not fish! (talk) 16:45, 18 April 2012 (UTC)

Maybe because this is absolutely the wrong page for your request? Read the big shaded box at the top of the page; it says: "Proposed new articles belong at Wikipedia:Requested articles." Alternatively, you could try WikiProject Spaceflight, of which you seem to be a member. Nageh (talk) 19:31, 18 April 2012 (UTC)

That has a CRH. That means it has been mainly let un attended and I had already asked for an article here an got green signals.--Al Sheik!Woiu!I do not fish! (talk) 03:41, 19 April 2012 (UTC)

And what is to discuss here?--Al Sheik!Woiu!I do not fish! (talk) 06:29, 19 April 2012 (UTC)

This page is for proposals to change Wikipedia's processes. — The Hand That Feeds You:^Bite 16:36, 21 April 2012 (UTC)

Make Disclaimers More Visible

It seems that most of the people who complain about offensive images have not read the disclaimer about them—and I can hardly blame them. While the disclaimer is linked from every page, it is not very visible; very few average readers bother to read the footnotes, because they do not really care about the copyright information, and most pages require some amount of scrolling to reach the bottom. As the disclaimer is an important point to make to our readers, I propose that the link to it be moved to the side bar, under "Donate to Wikipedia", where it would be immediately visible on every page. Interchangeable 18:41, 18 April 2012 (UTC)

Does it even matter?

I'm trying to envision the conversation you expect to happen:

Newbie: There are pictures of naked men in this porn-related article! What are you, a bunch of perverts?!

You: See the disclaimer.

Newbie: Oh, that's all good, then! Thanks for letting me know that there's a disclaimer protecting the little children from seeing those porn stills!

It's just not very realistic, is it? WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:57, 18 April 2012 (UTC)

Yep, a disclaimer also doesn't address NSFW issues. Using the "Random article" link in the office can be dangerous. Regards, RJH (talk) 22:12, 18 April 2012 (UTC)

If there's no point in referring users to a disclaimer, why is it linked from every page in the first place? Interchangeable 23:06, 18 April 2012 (UTC)

Before the event, the disclaimer is of little use since most users will not click on it, even if you embellish it with giant breasts. After the event, you can gently point to the fact that it is linked from every page. In other news, you may have noticed that very many websites put the boring stuff - disclaimers, privacy policy - at the foot of their web pages. It's not tremendously valuable screen real estate. Users who care about this sort of stuff tend to know that that is one of the places to look. --Tagishsimon (talk) 23:10, 18 April 2012 (UTC)

Having a disclaimer makes the legal folks happy. I'm not sure that it matters to anyone else. Ditto for the foundation:Terms of Use, which is changing in about a month. (It's "only" been discussed for most of a year now, with repeated notices in the Village Pumps and other forums, so you should expect to see people completely freaking out when the change is actually made and they discover, once again, that they don't control Wikipedia.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:02, 22 April 2012 (UTC)

Make suppress redirect available to trusted users

Hi. Why not make the suppress redirect option available for auto-confirmed users? First of all, it is of great help to all users working in WP:RM. Secondly, that is going to make the names simpler. Consider on a bad name of a article; written professionally. Like: "Example is a bad guy" is the article title; but the article's content refers to the apple iPad, written brilliantly, without bias, etc. This would be of great help to all auto-confirmed users. Thanks. Dipankan says.. ^{("Be bold and edit!")} 10:20, 26 March 2012 (UTC)

Misuse of the suppress redirect function will leave the editors who created the page confused and lost. Also, the potential for misuse by vandals, who have no trouble getting autoconfirmed would be substantial. Snowolf ^{How can I help?} 11:31, 26 March 2012 (UTC)

Then make it available for editors with 6 months and 1000+ edit's experience or something like that. Whatever, it's going to very useful for all workers in areas which requires moving of pages. Dipankan says.. ^{("Be bold and edit!")} 12:37, 26 March 2012 (UTC)

A better way might be to give the option to everyone when there are no links to or transclusion of the page. (May need some development work though.) -- WOSlinker (talk) 13:08, 26 March 2012 (UTC)

• Oppose. This will, for all intents and purposes give autoconfirmed users the power to delete articles. What's to keep someone from moving an article into their userspace, waiting a while, and then CSD U1ing a "userspace draft"? (or just leaving it there to rot) --Ron Ritzman (talk) 13:24, 26 March 2012 (UTC)

Wouldn't move log still be there? Can't users abuse this approach already, or are incoming redirects checked when U1 is requested? Even if they are, the user can replace original article with a non-redirect. Isn't that why history/move log should always be checked regardless? Just wondering. —  HELLKNOWZ  ▎TALK 13:31, 26 March 2012 (UTC)

As an admin, I can assure you that it's easy to overlook single entries when looking over a page history for a U1 speedy; I've made mistakes of this sort more than once. I've recently seen lots of pages get speedy deleted that didn't qualify even for regular deletion — they had been moved and then tagged, and there were so many of these pages that the deleting admin didn't realise that there was a substantial problem. That's the biggest reason I oppose this idea, but even beside that, I think it's a solution in search of a problem. Seeing how I almost never see any type of {{db-move}} situations at CAT:CSD, I believe that Dipankan greatly overestimates the number of times that this ability would be used. Finally, if just about anyone can suppress a redirect, we'd likely see lots of redirects getting deleted needlessly — I often see redirects up for deletion despite points 4 and 5 of WP:RFD#KEEP; if this proposal passes, we'd run the risk of breaking tons of incoming links and links in page histories. Nyttend (talk) 14:50, 26 March 2012 (UTC)

• Support, but I think users would have to meet a certain threshold. I recognize there are problems, but I'd submit that the great majority of them are from the incompetent children who do a month or two of playing policemen at NPP and leave; if we restricted it to more experienced users, I don't think it would wreak too much havoc. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 04:48, 28 March 2012 (UTC)
• Support as a userright that is no more controversial than Rollback, per The Blade of the Northern Lights. We have to be very careful about LTAs that use autoconfirmed sleeper socks.Jasper Deng (talk) 04:51, 28 March 2012 (UTC)
• Oppose Per Ron, the risks of confusion or subterfuge outweigh the small gain of efficiency. MBisanz ^talk 05:00, 28 March 2012 (UTC)
• Oppose. Looking through my logs, I reckon I've made ~750 page moves as a non-admin and I can probably count the number of times I've had to tag the resulting redirect for deletion on one hand. This function is already misused enough by admins, I don't think giving it to more users would be a positive. Jenks24 (talk) 08:13, 28 March 2012 (UTC)

  Then you're exceptionally lucky, because before I was an admin I had dozens of page moves from startlingly hideous titles (I.e. Article writting to Tarkhan Mughals). The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 15:40, 28 March 2012 (UTC)

  Yes, I agree that NPPers can come across some weirdly titled articles, but they are few and far between. Most moves I've made when looking through Special:NewPages are either capitalisation or style/MoS fixes, where a redirect should be left behind. The outliers, such as Article writting, can be dealt with by a R3 tag and don't do any harm if they are alive for a few hours longer (in fact, they could arguably help the new users find the article they created). Jenks24 (talk) 07:39, 29 March 2012 (UTC)

• Comment I think a experienced user won't be damaging things around; if a strict set of guidelines is set. Dipankan says.. ^{("Be bold and edit!")} 15:35, 28 March 2012 (UTC)
• Oppose Leaving a redirect behind isn't so bad. We have a procedure to remove a redirect when needed. Usually leaving the redirect is a good thing. (But I strongly oppose the suggestion that we introduce a new level of time+edits that gets the option to not create a redirect; this is instruction creep AND it creates another distinction between editors.) RJFJR (talk) 15:49, 28 March 2012 (UTC)
• Oppose I have seen admins deleting (or surpressing) redirects that where needed due to incoming links because the article titles did not follow there prefered form. Too much damage can be done here - and who is is going to do a surpressed-redirect-patrol? Agathoclea (talk) 18:28, 28 March 2012 (UTC)
• Comment While creating a main space article by moving a page from user space or from AFC, we might need to delete pages by putting a housekeeping tag. That makes it a lot more easier. Dipankan says.. ^{("Be bold and edit!")} 04:11, 31 March 2012 (UTC)
• Oppose too easy to vandalize. Mugginsx (talk) 16:10, 1 April 2012 (UTC)
  • Just popping up again; just to remind that draft policy will include it for users with a certain requirement; like experienced; more than 6 months; and 1500+ edits or something like that. Dipankan says.. ^{("Be bold and edit!")} 13:36, 5 April 2012 (UTC)
• Support user right Petrb (talk) 09:21, 2 April 2012 (UTC)
• Oppose as it seems like an invitation to sock it up and wheel it out. Josh Parris 23:42, 5 April 2012 (UTC)
  • Comment: No, despite your edit summary comment that isn't possible out of the blacklist, moreover that is trackable by the history; but I also oppose as autoconfirmed is a status which can be too easy to gain. mabdul 23:50, 5 April 2012 (UTC)
    • Make it available for file movers? They have to delete nonsensical redirects. Just to inform; I have changed the title - everybody thinks it's given to autoconfirmed, but no. Dipankan says.. ^{("Be bold and edit!")} 02:46, 6 April 2012 (UTC)
• Oppose giving it to autoconfirmed users (open to a lot of abuse), but weak support for making a new usergroup and support for merging to groups such as rollbackers and file movers. (P.S. global rollbackers can do this)  Hazard-SJ  ㋡  00:46, 11 April 2012 (UTC)
• Oppose per the comments I made above on 26 March 2012. Nyttend (talk) 01:07, 20 April 2012 (UTC)

User Right

After a community input it is decided that many users support a user right for this. Those who want to support making this a user right; give reasons for your support. Those who want to oppose that; also provide reasons. Please use the hash sign, put support or oppose.

Actually I see quite the opposite above. There were only a few supports and plenty of opposes, so I thing that "many users support a user right for this" is inaccurate at best. Clearly there is no support for this measure as shown above. Snowolf ^{How can I help?} 14:16, 14 April 2012 (UTC)

Most user's are thinking about auto-confirmed but it's not. Dipankan says.. ^{("Be bold and edit!")} 16:15, 14 April 2012 (UTC)

• Support I think that most of admin tools should be available as a separate permissions in fact. I see nothing wrong on that. Petrb (talk) 09:25, 19 April 2012 (UTC)
• Comment (and oppose) WP:STRAW comes to mind in this section. Also '4 supports for user right' against '8 opposes' (Just counting numbers) does not constitute "Many users" as Snowolf commented above. I also challenge the validity of this poll in the first place as i don't see it listed on WP:CENT or similar. Besides that, i oppose. I see to many possible caveats with this specific user right. Excirial ^{(Contact me,Contribs)} 06:26, 24 April 2012 (UTC)

Question de perméabilité

Bonjour: Le site explicatif du projet Wikivoyage me renvoie ici, je présume donc que c'est sur cette page que l'on peut faire les remarques et critiques concernant ce projet.

Quel seront les possibilités de "passage" entre le noyau de Wikipedia et le projet W.v. ? Par exemple si existe une "fiche touristique" pour tel château, telle grotte, tel observatoire antique... pourra-t-on facilement y accéder depuis une page Wiki, ou faudra-t-il le considérer comme lien extérieur ?

Réciproquement, une fiche touristique devra accéder aux renseignements géografiques, historiques, linguistiques... de Wikipedia.

Bref: au total, ne serait-ce pas plus simple de créer (ou développer) une catégorie "Tourisme" ?

Personnellement, je serais d'une piètre aide : ma spécialité est plutôt les petit corps du système solaire (astéroïdes, comètes) qui ne seront des objectifs touristiques que dans un avenir lointain.

--Jean-François Clet (talk) 11:29, 24 July 2012 (UTC)