Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)/Archive 43

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This page contains discussions that have been archived from Village pump (policy). 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.

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ANOTHER Videogame Feature?

Who decides feature articles? A committee of teenage boys? Wikipedia needs to grow up. pointlessforest (talk) 02:11, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

If people start writing Featured articles about different topics, there will be fewer video games on the main page. For now, the video game wikiproject is doing a great job getting their articles to FA-status. Karanacs (talk) 02:26, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

Wasn't this already discussed when ESRB re-rating of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion was featured on main page? Didn't we agree that the issue was raised by users that had never participated on the reviews to select which featured articles get to the main page? Didn't we agree that 1 of 30 featured article are about videogames and that it's natural that one reaches the main page every 30 days? Didn't we agree that all featured articles have an opportunity to reach the main page independently of their topic? Didn't we agree that if you think an article should not be featured then you should ask for a review of its status? Didn't we agree that the people complaining had not participated on the reviews that decide if an article gets featured on the first place? Quick, someone find the old village pump discussion and link it here old Village Pump discussion about reforming the process and firing the director and also the discussion on the article's talk page about it. --Enric Naval (talk) 13:16, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

Today's Signpost Dispatch has instructions on how to become a Featured Article reviewer, located at Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2008-04-07/Dispatches. People are encouraged to participate at FAC and FAR. Karanacs (talk) 15:47, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

Allow new Wikipedias in ancient languages?

There is a current discussion about the posibility of continuing wikipedias in ancient languages, in the list of wikimedia titled Allow new wikis in extinct languages?. if you want to susbcribe to the list enter here. We need know your opinion for taking a decission. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 190.40.199.236 (talk) 21:37, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

if i understand this correctly, you're (someone) suggesting that they start wikipedias in dead tongues... like sanskrit or coptic... now, i dom't mean to sound like a schmuck... but that is one really stupid idea. think about it for a few minutes....

AeturnalNarcosis (talk) 03:54, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

Consider that the Latin Wikipedia is doing reasonably well. Think about it for a few minutes.... --Carnildo (talk) 07:03, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

i doubt that... just because it has alot of articles on it doesn't mean that it's useful.

it means that there's a few people with alot of free time who can translate useful articles (in modern languages) into unuseful languages. how many hits does latin wikipedia get a day? if it's less than 200, it's a waste of server space.

although there are people who can probably understand latin to a minor extent because their native language (such as Spanish or Italian) is closely related to it, i sincerely doubt they waste their time looking up anything on the latin wikipedia when they have a wikipedia in their respective, and still used, native tongue.

point is: wikipedia is a reference center. who's going to look something up in cumbric or latin when their native born tongue is french or english? it's a waste of time, effort, and server space to write encyclopaedias in languages that no one uses anymore.

AeturnalNarcosis (talk) 21:20, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

I think it might be a good idea, but the danger would be so few users would edit it it would be easily susceptible to trolling and other shenanigans. JeanLatore 14:57, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

“The battle for Wikipedia's soul”

• http://www.economist.com/printedition/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10789354

“ Wikipedia is facing an identity crisis as it is torn between two alternative futures. It can either strive to encompass every aspect of human knowledge, no matter how trivial; or it can adopt a more stringent editorial policy and ban articles on trivial subjects, in the hope that this will enhance its reputation as a trustworthy and credible reference source. These two conflicting visions are at the heart of a bitter struggle inside Wikipedia between “inclusionists”, who believe that applying strict editorial criteria will dampen contributors' enthusiasm for the project, and “deletionists” who argue that Wikipedia should be more cautious and selective about its entries. ”

Edit point

I think it is time we decide which way to go. There have been many failed attempts to address this, but they all failed due to their partisan or limited nature. Generally speaking which way does the community want to go? -- Cat ^chi? 03:36, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

We want to evaluate each case separately. Nokmar (talk) 03:40, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

I think the community should read false dilemma. Postdlf (talk) 03:48, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

I just read the article. I value encyclopedias for their educational value, but tend to take a classical view of education. That is, I view it as a process not only of informing, but of intellectual improvement. Encyclopedias are of no value if they do not produce valuable and insightful information. The Economist gave the example of Solidarity leaders and Pokémon characters. I take the view that we should have entries on all Solidarity leaders, but no entries on Pokémon characters (just the show itself). Some works of literature and cinema do have value because they sometimes provide insight through fictional symbolism. They also at times produce social change. Pokémon, on the other hand, is a meaningless children's show with no educational value. I understand that this is a dangerous contradiction, though. I have seen many insightful and notable entries nominated for deletion simply because they were too foreign to the nominator. They appeared not to be notable. So I think we should state clearly that subjects with educational and intellectual value are always notable and shallow subjects are not.--Awareshiftjk (talk) 03:57, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

Passing judgment on what's "shallow" and what's "intellectual" doesn't strike me as very NPOV. At least "notability" is something that one can attempt to objectively define, in terms of it being something that a lot of people are interested in (even if it's shallow), but trying to decide what has intellectual merit... very subjective. *Dan T.* (talk) 04:01, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

Exactly what I was going to say. There is far, far too much subjectivity involved in determining what has educational and intellectual value. And while I would personally agree on the lack of value to me of a Pokemon character, at the same time, an article such as 2003-04 Calgary Flames season might be seen as having no value to a Pokemon fan where it has a great deal to me. In such a case, who is right? Ultimately, to respond to White Cat's question we have places like Conservapedia for the limited "educational scope", and wikia for all things "trivial". Wikipedia has sailed down the middle of the two alternatives for some time now, and I don't see the harm in continuing on this course. Resolute 04:07, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

So, User:White Cat, are you actually suggesting that we need to make a general, high level decision about whether we are "inclusionist" or "exclusionist"? What possible purpose would that serve? Sarcasticidealist (talk) 04:04, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

Awareshift's idea strikes me as somewhat unfeasible and unrealistic, largely because what does possess educational and intellectual value to one person does not to another. I personally would say that Dungeons & Dragons possesses such value (because of its reading level and (depending on DM) morals system), but, even assuming good faith towards him, he would likely think otherwise based off of the fact it has movies and video games. Seriously, when was the last video game where you were forced to divide by the cosine of x? Remember, Wikipedia is for a layman's audience. It isn't for profs at the University of Washington trying to make foot warmers out of nosehairs. -Jéské ^{(v^_^v :L13 ½-Raichu Soulknife)} 04:11, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

Those young people you speak of should visit Wikipedia to study math or history instead of kill time. I imagine that reading about Dungeons and Dragons too often will actually hurt your performance in school.--Awareshiftjk (talk) 04:38, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, Awareshift, but if they study them, there's a very good chance those articles are suddenly going to be plastered with the word "WANKER" or "VAGINA" over and over again, thus nullifying their educational value for a short time. A lot of kids don't want to study; they'd rather have fun, and if it means replacing Prisoner's dilemma with a picture of George Carlin masturbating, so be it. -Jéské ^{(v^_^v :L13 ½-Raichu Soulknife)} 04:50, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

I know they study them. I don't think that they should, but they do.--Awareshiftjk (talk) 05:18, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

Are we talking about the same articles? -Jéské ^{(v^_^v :L13 ½-Raichu Soulknife)} 05:23, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

(ec)Footwarmers out of nosehairs? What class do they teach that in? -- RoninBK _{T C} 04:17, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

Furthermore, "educational and intellectual value" are a matter of how a subject is covered, not of what the subject is. Most universities (American ones, at least) have cultural studies courses that explore "shallow" pop culture, because shallow or not it's significant and it's illustrative, and we help ourselves more by understanding it than by ignoring it out of some kind of misguided belief in a separation between high and low culture. Postdlf (talk) 04:15, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

I disagree. The distinction I was making was not between high or low culture. It was between meaningless and meaningful as well as between influential and weak subjects. I have no bias against anything new or popular, so long as learning about it is truly educational. So, try as you might, I doubt that you would be able to produce an article about Pokémon that would be worth reading intellectually.--Awareshiftjk (talk) 04:38, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

I think we already have, to an extent. We'd honestly be less likely to have an intellectual article about, say, Neopets because of outside influences. I hate to say this, but in this case at this point in time, Pokémon beats out Neopets for intellectual read.

It is because of these external influences that we can never have intellectual articles of some subjects, say Transnistria or Israel. Should we delete them because nationalists are using Wikipedia as a battleground, or should we keep them and invalidate your very point? -Jéské ^{(v^_^v :L13 ½-Raichu Soulknife)} 04:50, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

I think just learning the facts about Israel is enough to provide insight and learn lessons from history as well as the present. It would be even more insightful if we allowed analysis like Encyclopaedia Britannica does, but facts are good, too. You claim that the entry "Pokémon" teaches readers important lessons. What lessons did you learn from reading it that help you understand life? In other words, how did reading it make you a more intelligent person?--Awareshiftjk (talk) 05:18, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

Well, reading it taught me that you seem to like Citizendium more. Seriously, though, your example is a bad one because, as I have stated, that set of articles (Israel/Palestine) is a cultural hotbed and tends to be skewed, and I do not believe a skewed view of a conflict helps anyone. As for the Pokémon article, I seem to have gotten the mistaken impression you were talking about challenging reading, not programming the next set of robots. -Jéské ^{(v^_^v :L13 ½-Raichu Soulknife)} 05:23, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

No, I was talking about educational reading, which may be challenging or not. Intelligence is a function of both knowledge and the ability to understand new things (in my opinion). Learning about Israel teaches people about the fundamental world views of Jews and Muslims. It isn't about a strip of land. It is about their views of tolerance and history as well as the ephemerality of foreign alliances. Alliances are meaningless because they can dissolve into war at any time. It also teaches the reader how Muslims and Jews care much more about history than others. These are all insights one can deduce from reading about Israel, to use your example. Learning about history helps us predict the future and understand the present. I occasionally read Encyclopedia Judaica which has a Jewish bias. I also occasionally listen to Arab commentators. Both are biased, but both commentaries help me understand Israel.--Awareshiftjk (talk) 05:33, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

Learning about history can predict the future? WHY THE FUCK DID I GET INTO TAROT?!

In my opinion, intelligence is not *what* you know. someone could not know y=mx+b and still be intelligent. Someone, likewise, could know the name of a minor character in, say Dexter's Laboratory and still be intelligent. No, intelligence is *how* you use your knowledge. Reading about history is no more intelligent than playing through a game of Magic: The Gathering. Only if you can use the knowledge gained from the activity is it of any use. Calling something "intellectual", as you're currently doing, strikes me as rather anti-intellectual. No layman wants to read an article on history if they have something better to do, such as laundry, bathing their gimp, or waterskiing.

I can guarantee you that, if you delete every article not related to the 3 R's or Nobel Prize categories, you'll be stuck with a bland lump of dry, gray putty that was once an ornate and intricate statue. -Jéské ^{(v^_^v :L13 ½-Raichu Soulknife)} 05:42, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

First, I define intelligence as the ability to understand things--both new and familiar. Learning certain types of facts does improve intelligence. For one thing, learning meaningful facts over time makes you reflect on their meaning. This is mental exercise that improves your intelligence. For example, memorizing mathematical formulas will not necessarily improve your ability to understand new formulas, but trying to comprehend what the formulas actually mean will. Mathematical intelligence also improves musical intelligence, and visa-versa. Likewise, learning about history helps you understand current affairs. Memorizing a single date will not do anything. But, as you learn about different events, you begin to see patterns and reflect on them. This is also mental exercise. I fail to see any underlying meaning to Pokémon cartoons, so watching Pokémon will not educate you.--Awareshiftjk (talk) 06:33, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

And playing it? Pokémon is, believe it or not, a video game first and animé <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Lupin/navpop.css&action=raw&ctype=text/css&dontcountme=s">second. -Jéské ^{(v^_^v :L13 ½-Raichu Soulknife)} 07:23, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

To be fair, I was recently grading homework for a computer science course and one of the students explained class based inheritance using examples from Pokémon. I think it's dangerous to exclude information because you don't see the value in it, someone else might. I know I value Wikipedia because it's inclusive. --Edalytical (talk) 19:49, 10 March 2008 (UTC)

Personally, I believe that it is the balance of inclusionism and deletionism that provides the proper balance that Wikipedia needs to have. The problem is that it needs to be balanced. Tilting too far inclusionist, and you become indiscriminate, go look at a Trivia section to see what I mean. Tilting too far Deletionist, and potentially good articles are shot on sight, before they have the opportunity to become viable, WP:The Heymann Standard. As much as we state that AfD is not cleanup, often times the threat of deletion is the catalyst that drives the article beyond a mere stub. And our wide-scale inclusion criteria is exactly what separates Wikipedia from the rest.. -- RoninBK _{T C} 04:13, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

In other words, we need both inclusionists and deletionists so we end up with a straight pole. Gwinva (talk) 04:26, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

My view, and I hope it is widely shared, is that any subject is acceptable for inclusion as long as there are reliable outside sources to keep everybody honest. The "battle" will only be lost if unsourced information proliferates on Wikipedia, which at first will seem like the inclusionists won, but will be quickly followed by the loss of Wikipedia's "soul" as people's first stop, as a useful, fact-checked clearinghouse of information. AnteaterZot (talk) 04:46, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

Suggest the community read C.S. Lewis' book An Experiment in Criticism, where he argued that the value of literature is as much a reflection of the reader as of what is read, and that efforts to divide literature into "highbrow" and "lowbrow" and assuming that "lowbrow" means "not serious" have been a really, really, really bad idea that prevents real literary appreciation and growth. He suggested a moratorium on trying to judge "literary merit" and using a different approach. What's true for literature is true for other things as well. Best, --Shirahadasha (talk) 05:48, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

Presence of Pokemon related articles are not responsible in the absence of quality on articles on polish solidarity leaders. However there probably are more secondary sources on Pokemon than polish solidarity leaders. We do not delete articles on polish solidarity leaders or prevent their development to make room for pokemon related articles. It is just that nobody has yet written those articles. In addition do we really want a user that is an expert in pokemon write about polish solidarity leaders? No offense but getting indulged in pokemon in the past ten plus years does not make any one an expert in polish solidarity leaders. Pop culture (Pokemon) aside, this problem plagues even important articles just as much as the economist illustrates. -- Cat ^chi? 11:12, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

The other thing that I don't think that the economist article considers or that is brought up here is that because we are a volunteer project, we cannot force people to write or work on topics they have no interest in. Since WP is an internet culture, it is going to attack a cross-section of the larger internet culture - meaning that we are going to have a lot more people working on articles on anime characters and video games than we are going to have on political figures from non-English speaking countries. This itself is an overall systematic bias that we have to be aware of, but know that we cannot change (otherwise, editors will leave once we tell them they must do something), but by developing policies and guidelines to make such that those topics are treated in an encyclopedic fashion such that when we can "fill in" other topics such as solidarity leaders, we have encyclopedic coverage of those topics as well as more popular culture topics, with an overall increase in the apparent quality of the encyclopedia. This doesn't mean we delete the coverage nor prevent appropriate expansion of pop culture topics to make other topics look better, but it does mean we have to consider how much weight some of those topics are given relative to the goals of creating an encyclopedia. Basically, the Economist article almost is looking at WP now as a finished product and saying that it's bad, but if you keep in mind and consider that we are unfinished, then it is perfectly fine that our coverage is currently unbalanced, as long as we understand that the goal is to get to a good balance and take steps to help get us there now. --MASEM 14:06, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia by very nature will never be a finished project. All articles that are not featured in quality are incomplete and will not be a part of the finished product. In other words they are already edited out before they reach the end of the production line. They can became featured articles in time but they will definitely not if people do not allow work on them. This is why I cannot understand some people, namely so-called deletionists, work they way in removing clearly incomplete articles. The articles on popular culture and solidarity figures in Poland are typically unrelated. Balancing the amount of content on pupular culture and other topics by removing popular culture related articles does not sound very productive to me. -- Cat ^chi? 17:59, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

And I'm not saying we delete them, but instead make sure that our pop culture topics are edited in the same encyclopedic manner as our topics on world leaders and history and geography and other more "non-trivial" topics. We may need to trim the depth of coverage these presently have and utilize outside wiki's for overflow, but there's no reason we can't cover these to at least a degree that meets with the Five Pillars. --MASEM 18:46, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

What is happening is self righteous people are mass removing material on topics they dont care much about. This has no consensus behind it. If there is consensus behind it, I can start trimming articles I do not care about. I have a very long list to process I suppose. Of course eventually we would be only left with the main page in such a thing. -- Cat ^chi? 21:56, 8 March 2008 (UTC)

Assuming good faith, they are trying to help clean up WP, though methods such as TTN has taken have not been constructive to this. However, the concept of merging topics failing notability into other areas should be a point that is taken much more at heart before articles have to hit AfD, and even if AfD is still reached, this should always be an option -outright deletion of a contested article without any considering of retaining that information is bad. --MASEM 22:14, 8 March 2008 (UTC)

I wish people creating shitty fancruft would use a spell checker. Also, lots of fancruft is part of some huge business franchise, which produces stuff in various formats that are used as sources -thus entire swathes of wiki are "in universe". Really, I don't care how trivial it is, I just wish they could write betterer. Dan Beale-Cocks 22:56, 9 March 2008 (UTC)

betterer? or more better? :) Sbowers3 (talk) 00:10, 10 March 2008 (UTC)

The whole content discussion is as old as ... Throughout human cultural history arising trends and opinions of rulers (or the opponents of same) have continuously created, destroyed and recreated. Archeologists make a living digging up what remains and are faced with whether to preserve the Christian mural or chisel it off to reveal the hieroglyphs beneath. French scouts caused uproar and laughter when they removed neolytic "graffiti" from a cave. Just to site a few examples. The list of now famed painters who lived and died without their work being recognized is endless. (Anyone for a Vermeer bonfire?) Knowledge is power, but today's trash may turn into tomorrow's treasure. You'll be hard put to find a book on how to lay a thatched roof in most libraries, since it they are no longer common. Yet university research projects exist trying to preserve and recover this lost art. When I grew up knowing how to use a slide rule was an essential skill. Preserving it would have met the highest standards for "value". My nephew may get to look at one in a museum, since I threw mine out as "junk". The Spanish smelted down "worthless pagan" Inca trinkets to produce items meeting their "high" cultural standards. By declaring a certain knowledge to be "worthless" or "valuable" each preceding generation tries to stamp their own ideas and value systems on the next generation, who are duty bound to resist with all their might in the interest of human progress. What survives or is revived after jumping one or more generations is our "cultural heritage". Now Wikipedia introduces as novel an idea to how knowledge is maintained as democracy was to despotism. I hope the self declared guardians of knowledge are going to die out with one of the following generations. Knowing "Pokemon" characters is as basic a skill to the next generation as knowing "Dr. Seuss" was to mine. There are quotes and proverbs in the literature my generation is leaving behind describing things as "seussian". I hope no one will have deleted the relevant wiki-page when my grandkids stumble over those. So I'd suggest creating a central "graveyard" for deleted pages to save future archeologists and ethnologists some work. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.236.23.111 (talk) 09:25, 18 March 2008 (UTC)

The true problem: notability and mainstream media justification policies

The true problem is in the notability and similar policies. That can make any silly detail of Pokemon super-relevant (maybe millions of hits in Google and stuff like that) while much more relevant artists from non-English, and specially third world countries, countries can pass unadverted or even be deleted as non-notable.

These overall criteria bias the contents of Wikipedia in favor of mere trivia. We need a more academic and, as much as possible, less mediatic approach.

As for the problem with children vandalism, the best solution is surely to stop censoring certain images, so schools start censoring Wikipedia at least in class time. That would save a lot of work to our patrollers.

I am inclusionist for encyclopedic content and for what allows for a more and better of our world. But I am exclusionist for trivia, and the articles on Pokemon, Star Trek, the Simpson... chapters, minor characters, etc. belong to a fanzine or some media not Wikipedia.

Maybe the solution is to create "Wikizine" inside Wikimedia, for such more diverse but less encyclopedic activities. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Sugaar (talk • contribs) 05:06, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

Those images are censored because they are illegal or in the wrong article altogether. Further, I haevily doubt you are familiar with the discussion that took place at WT:POKE some time ago. Pokémon species articles (sans Pikachu) have been lists for a few months now. Further, as I have stated, owing to external influences (i.e. rival factions editing) we'd also have to, if we implemented your reasoning, remove all articles on wars, rogue nations, and cultural conflict so as to present as bland and tasteless a view of the world as possible. Shit, the pixies couldn't come up with a scheme better designed to turn everyone into mindless robots who only know exactly what they have to know and nothing else. -Jéské ^{(v^_^v :L13 ½-Raichu Soulknife)} 05:14, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

I will point out that I've been struggling with other editors to fine-tune and polish WP:FICT (and to a lesser extent WP:EPISODE) to reflect a balance that makes both sides happy, in that we can give good coverage when we can provide secondary source (why should the reader care about this work if they've never heard of it), while providing primary sourced information to meet the "WP is not paper" approach of including such. It has taken a while to get here, but the metaphore of balancing a straight pole by pushing at a slant is very apt: initial drafts went too far in one direction, and fine tuning got it to where it is. We do suggest that for more in-depth treatment of fictional topics that a outside wiki is completely appropriate (though people balk at any push on Wikia due to possible conflict-of-interest issues), and I think we're now in the learning stages of figuring out that exact balance for many areas, thanks in some part to the recent ArbCom cases. I know there's inclusists vs deletionists, but I strongly believe we don't need to rush to make a decision, unless we get a mandate from the Foundation to take this in one direction or the other. We need the compromise and figure out steps forward from that. --MASEM 05:43, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

Secondary sources have little to do with notability but with popularity. Every armed forces servicemen have a secondary source covering their life. "Unheard of" would not be shows televised internationally on multiple countries. If being "heard of" is notability, then definitely thats not what is happening. -- Cat ^chi? 10:55, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

Not true: while a popular work may lead to large coverage in secondary sources (a very common case), this is not the only way a topic can gain secondary sourcing and thus sufficient sourcing to be included. "Significant coverage in secondary sources" is a measure of the cumulative effects of a topic's popularity, importance, effect on other people, and other areas, while falling under the goal of the Five Pillars. So notability is not reflecting "being heard of". --MASEM 14:14, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

Right polularity and etc, which are not the same as notability. It is a poor metric for notability. -- Cat ^chi? 17:59, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

Being sourced in multiple independent reliable sources is a bad metric for notability? Seems to meet all our principles to be a verifiable, no-original-research encyclopedia. --MASEM 19:20, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

You should read UK press sometime - very many pages are devoted to c and d list "celebrities", but not much coverage is given to, for example, mathematicians or scientists. Unless they produce a populist "study" showing that 'drinking wine is healthy' (which will get mis-reported.) Thus WP ends up with a gajillion sources for someone who comes third in a TV singing competition, and will have infoboxes giving that person's age, weight, hight, eye colour, blood type, etc etc. Dan Beale-Cocks 13:43, 10 March 2008 (UTC)

Seeing as this thread began with a quote from an article in the Economist I thought it worth mentioning that there is another article about wikipedia in the March 20, 2008 issue of the New York Review of Books, titled "The Charms of Wikipedia". The author describes himself as an "inclusionist" and tells of how he ended up as a defender against article deletions, with a bit of mocking about the notion of "notability". Looks like the article is currently online here. Just thought it might be of interest. Pfly (talk) 06:44, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

I particularly liked the part about "the biggest leaf pile anyone had ever seen." --Pixelface (talk) 07:58, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

Well, I liked "When, last year, some computer scientists at the University of Minnesota studied millions of Wikipedia edits, they found that most of the good ones—those whose words persisted intact through many later viewings—were made by a tiny percentage of contributors. Enormous numbers of users have added the occasional enriching morsel to Wikipedia—and without this bystander's knowledge the encyclopedia would have gone nowhere—but relatively few users know how to frame their contribution in a form that lasts." from the same article. AnteaterZot (talk) 07:44, 8 March 2008 (UTC)

A high level discussion

About a year ago, no one was even trying to mass blank/redirectify articles of trivial topics. Afds on these were also mostly unheard of. This isn't an inclusionist vs. deletionist discussion. This notion is not based on consensus or discussion at all, if so please cite this community-wide discussion. I think because the covered topics are trivial individually no one wants to spend time discussing them individually. Although the practice of reviewing and establishing notability itself should be done on a case by case basis, this is an overall general discussion to reach a general agreement on the topic to hopefully establish what to do and what not to do.

Our criteria in establishing what is notable may need adjustment. As the economist article discusses, important topics with a capital "I" may have very little to no secondary coverage that are readily available to establish notability. Likewise things with overwhelming coverage from secondary sources may be fundamentally trivial which isn't necessarily article worthy then again it may very well be article worthy.

It is important to note that different sections on WP:NOT (WP:NOT#PAPER, WP:NOT#OR, WP:NOT#MANUAL, WP:NOT#INFO (often linked to as WP:NOT#NEWS or WP:NOT#PLOT)) are not in conflict with each other.

-- Cat ^chi? 10:55, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

White Cat, this didn't seem to be a problem until recently. I don't know that for certain, but I used Wikipedia in the past, stopped using it for a long, long time, then came back to find that the community seemed to have gotten totally thrown out of whack

This is basically a problem of various cabals -- you know who you are -- swarming around certain subjects. See Wikipedia:List of cabals. Most of those are jokes, but a fair amount of those are surprisingly legitimate. Several also aren't listed. There are also social clusters around anime, Star Trek, Star Wars, LOTR, etc.., and probably more stuff that I've missed.

Groups like this swarm around certain subjects (aside from all of the annoying bot owners, generating stuff, too, without an official RFA) and when people come by to enforce the guidelines, they're stifled because of a localized group of little kids defending their articles with democratic, bureaucratic authority, appealing to the fact that they are the "majority" and wikilawyering.

These same groups of people have all formed one giant monstrosity called "inclusionsts." Virtually every POV-pushing troll on Wikipedia supports Inclusionism. And why shouldn't he? If you want to promote your business, use Wikipedia for political propaganda, dump fan analysis on Wikipedia, or upload internet memes for the lulz, why wouldn't you support Inclusionism?

And it's important to point out that so-called "deletionists" aren't even really deletionists, as it seems to me. Perhaps some of them are, but that's silly. I say that because they don't have a blanket policy of wanting to delete articles. They simply want existing guidelines on the notability of fan fiction, pop culture, and copyvio, to be enforced. See m:Precisionism There wasn't this distinction before, because in the past, policies were enforced, I think. Crap like Chris Crocker (Internet celebrity) wouldn't have made the cut.

Clarification would be good, but not likely possible because inclusionists stand in the way of such clarification. But if the rules were simply enforced and these edit gangs were broken up, there wouldn't be a problem. ☯  Zenwhat (talk) 15:20, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

I'm disturbed by your example; Chris Crocker meets WP:BIO; the notion that enforcement of policy would result in deletion of that article demonstrates a deep misunderstanding of Wikipedia inclusions policy. JoshuaZ (talk) 15:46, 12 March 2008 (UTC)

I am an inclusionsist at heart. I am not a troll. I suggest you stop insulting me and people like me. Please post your comment in a civilized manner.

I am also unhappy with the group effort by some deletionists that work together to overwhelm any opposition in the way of the deletion. Basicaly they try to make up in numbers what they lack in logic.

-- Cat ^chi? 17:59, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

Wrong and wrong and wrong. You have not been insulted, yet you are insulting concerned editors of cabalising and wanting to destroy material. More importantly, you inclusionists are the ones who gang up in AfDs (and recently in RfAs of dissenters!) to suppress any reasonable deletion of unsalvageable in-universe crap. Dorftrottel (complain) 09:19, March 22, 2008

I understand the point about Notability being too low a bar, The problem is however, the only reason that Notability works at all is because it's an objective standard, that keeps out most of the trash, while being as fair to all. It doesn't matter what I think about a subject, as long as it has the required sources, it's in. Other than that, I don't like Notability that much. Perfectly good articles are being deleted simply because the subject predated Google. The problem is, how do you redefine that fence in a way that is objective and fair? -- RoninBK _{T C} 21:53, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

I'm not insulting you. I'm saying your philosophy is silly, not you, the person. There's a big difference there. Despite your philosophy, you seem to be a good editor. ☯  Zenwhat (talk) 21:52, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

Your offensive tone is unacceptable. What makes your philosophy any better than mine? You are insulting all opinions but your own it appears. Why should anyone care what you have to say given your attitude towards theirs? -- Cat ^chi? 21:41, 8 March 2008 (UTC)

Sanctioned alternate wikis?

Could part of this problem be solved by actively encouraging the opening of alternate Wiki's? Things like Memory Alpha and Wookieepedia seem to have the capability to host the bulk of information regarding their respective topics, with far less worry about relative importance.

Perhaps I'm an optimist, but I think the complaints of most "inclusionists" would be settled if there is a place that the information they want to share can be hosted. Oberiko (talk) 18:49, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

There are some Wikis, however, that are unusable by a specific group (i.e. the D&D Wiki because of its allowance of homebrew). And the inclusionists still won't be happy even if there is - most of the anons on Pokémon-related subjects complain that Wikipedia, by its very nature, should contain all the crufty crap that was the individual species articles. Whenever we tell them to go to Bulbapedia, they wing back a loud "NO!" and keep complaining. -Jéské ^{(v^_^v :L13 ½-Raichu Soulknife)} 19:27, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

If such an outlet exists then I'm going to agree with firmer rules. Perhaps something along the lines of "Would this content be more suited to an alternative wiki or as a Wikibook?" Oberiko (talk) 20:29, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

My main concern with alternate wikis is that their existence is sometimes abused in discussions, for instance by arguing that an article on a Star Wars-related topic should be removed because a Star Wars wiki already exists... Such arguments ignore the merits of an individual article and article topic, and instead focus on the general subject area (see below). Black Falcon ^(Talk) 20:36, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

Actually, that's not the arguments I see at D&D or Pokémon articles at all - they tend to focus more on the subject of the article and not the subject area. -Jéské ^{(v^_^v :L13 ½-Raichu Soulknife)} 21:01, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

I was referencing mostly various AFD discussions I've run across, which often contain comments to the effect of "Keep - Star Trek characters are obviously notable" or "Delete - there is a Star Trek wiki for this stuff". Neither coment addresses the article or article topic itself, but rather references some other, unrelated factor (the notability of the Star Trek franchise or the existence of a Star Trek wiki). Black Falcon ^(Talk) 22:46, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

I agree, Oberiko. Also, what you just said is now a part of WP:FICT: Wikipedia:Notability (fiction)#Relocating non-notable fictional material

It might be good to add a "move it elsewhere" section to WP:NOTABILITY, period. ☯  Zenwhat (talk) 21:54, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

Why do we even need wikipedia for? All articles on history can go to the history wiki because I have hereby officially declared them unnecesary. No one gave me this authority but hell I can mass redirectify articles regardless... -- Cat ^chi? 21:40, 8 March 2008 (UTC)

I agree totally. I would keep history, but move all sports off to a sports wiki. Perhaps make an exception for sports that have global appeal (football as in World Cup, tennis, cycling), but certainly only marginally important sports (lacrosse, cyclocross, American football). Mvuijlst (talk) 12:35, 10 March 2008 (UTC)

Focus on the topic, not the subject area

What happened to judging articles (and article topics) on their individual merits, as opposed to making sweeping generalisations about an entire subject area or entire class of topics (and entire groups of editors, for that matter)? Why are subjective personal opinions about the importance/unimportance or intellectual/popular/cultural value of a general subject area a part of discussions regarding something as objective as the presence of coverage in reliable source? And finally, what's the story with the Pokémon articles? (Why is it such a common example in these types of discussions?) Thanks, Black Falcon ^(Talk) 20:36, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

Pokémon articles are common examples because, up until last year, every single Pokémon species had its own individual article - and every single one of those articles (exc. Pikachu) had more cruft issues than a crack team of chimpanzee hackers trying to fix coding from Daikatana. After a discussion on WT:POKE, it was decided to merge all the species articles (again, sans Pikachu, and, more recently, into lists of 20). While the articles on the actual franchise and its video games are superbly-done articles (I can say this having worked on Pokémon Diamond and Pearl), the character articles are nowhere near as good as the game articles.

Pokémon also tends to get brought up because, until the megamerger, there was a "Pokémon Test" which was used at AfD to determine notability (for example, "Article Foo is less notable than Stunky"), and the entire metaseries tends to be somewhat pervasive. -Jéské ^{(v^_^v :L13 ½-Raichu Soulknife)} 20:59, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

You came this close to owing me a new keyboard for the Daikatana line... -- RoninBK _{T C} 22:15, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for clarifying! A number of comments I had previously read now make sense. (By the way, just so there is no confusion, my call to "focus on the topic, not the subject area" was a general call; it was not directed at either the Pokémon issue or your comment specifically.) Cheers, Black Falcon ^(Talk) 22:37, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

There are some subject areas that could have very many articles, but don't actually need them. Examples include Bus routes, Pokemon, wrestling articles (an article for every wrestler, for every episode, for every plot line, for every move etc), some tv shows or book series. It'd be great if these subjects had a few main "gateway" articles - editors could concentrate on making these excellent. I hate to sound so negative about these subjects; the dedication and knowledge shown by editors should be commended. I hate the artificial split into "deletionist" or "inclusionist" camps. Dan Beale-Cocks 13:52, 10 March 2008 (UTC)

"The result is that novices can quickly get lost in Wikipedia's Kafkaesque bureaucracy."

The rest of the article is just a blind. This is the key item. This is not the first time our deletion system *alone* is presented in an article, and even is mistaken as somehow being the core of wikipedia.

It isn't. It certainly shouldn't be notable or big enough to get articles in prominent magazines, all by itself.

The deletion pages on wikipedia have taken on a life of their own. "Wikipedia won't be able to survive without deletion" you say, but I've heard that before: "Wikipedia won't be able to survive without Esperanza" and "Wikipedia won't be able to survive without the AMA".

I'm skeptical we even need a deletion system. But if we do, perhaps we could make a new one from scratch, that actually follows wiki-principles. (Does anyone still know what those are? ;-) )

--Kim Bruning (talk) 22:55, 7 March 2008 (UTC) "bureaucracy, what bureaucracy? he said... while ripping it out and stuffing it under the carpet.

Oh I don't know. Wikipedia is one of the top ten most visited sites. People tend to care what happens in the sites on the top 10th most visited. -- Cat ^chi? 21:43, 8 March 2008 (UTC)

It seems to me that what you want may be a change in attitudes, rather than just a change in structure... Black Falcon ^(Talk) 23:15, 8 March 2008 (UTC)

What are the main arguments for deletion?

I can understand the need to prune articles that fall into Wikipedia:Conflict of interest, but I do find it somewhat difficult to grasp the need to get rid of articles such as characters from movies / television series' and the like. Can someone (in bullet point notation) lay out the primary reasons? Oberiko (talk) 15:17, 12 March 2008 (UTC)

While I am not convinced of the merits of the arguments, I think the basic idea is that many of these articles do not meet Wikipedia's notability guidelines (WP:N), and thus they should be merged into lists or deleted. The controversy arises because there doesn't seem to be broad consensus as to how stringently to interpret the guidelines. Fritter (talk) 16:41, 13 March 2008 (UTC)

It's all to do with the way that people have difference philosophies of what Wikipedia should be, and that people contribute for different reasons. There's two extreme points of view:

• Should Wikipedia aim to be a h2g2-style all-encompassing Wiki of all human knowledge? (An extreme "inclusionist" philosophy, or a "Wiki" philosophy)
• Should Wikipedia be an accessible encyclopedia aimed at writing encyclopedia-style topics for a general audience avoiding niche topics and only containing easily verifiable information? (An extreme "deletionist" philosophy, or an encyclopedia philosophy)

And several degrees between the two, where Wikipedia currently lands as it tries and come up with the limits between the two philosophies where there are quite blurred lines as articles become increasingly harder to verify as they increasingly contain more specific, niche, information and that's where heated arguments begin about where Wikipedia's boundaries should be exactly.

And there's no real answer to what the particular correct philosophy is, just opinions, and both ideas have their own sets of advantages and disadvantages, and you're never going to please both sides completely. It's a difficult problem without a solution and you're never going to please everyone. -Substitution (talk) 23:01, 14 March 2008 (UTC)

 So, as they say, "a good compromise leaves nobody happy".
 Unfortunately, anything involving mass satisfaction requires mass brainwashing.
 68.101.123.219 (talk) 16:56, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

IMHO: It is a noble (and perhaps even achievable) goal to have Wikipedia eventually contain all human knowledge. But to suddenly remove WP:NOTE and open the floodgates to having every kid in the world write an article about him or herself and to have "memorial" articles written about anyone's dead uncle, would be crazy at this point in the project. So extreme inclusionism is as dangerous as extreme deletionism. Wikipedia needs to grow towards "all of human knowledge" slowly. This means that we should consider gradually relaxing our notability standards year by year. I don't think it's unreasonable to say that (for example): "In 2009 we're going to remove the WP:SCHOOL guideline and allow the creation of articles about any school, in 2010, every musician who ever made a recording that was sold commercially and every author who ever published a book is eligable to have an article written about them". This is something we'd want to plan for - a gradual process.

It's already becoming quite difficult to find "notable" subjects about which much is known - yet which do not yet have a Wikipedia article. I think we are actually zeroing in on having written at least something about every subject that falls within our notability standards. This is evident from Wikipedia:Size of Wikipedia - the rate of creation of new articles is falling - presumably because we're finding fewer new things to write about.

The cost of disk space is still declining exponentially - but Wikipedia is now only growing linearly - so we should be able to relax the notability rules to allow more stuff at the same dollar cost.

The tricky part is attracting enough editors to maintain that material without declining standards - and I believe that the only way to do that is to make Wikipedia less bureaucratic. There really is a horrible maze of rules - some useful - but many are put there by people who've lost sight of the joy of editing articles and who have taken up Wikipolitics as a full time activity. Relaxing notability standards would be one way to attract new blood. The kid who innocently wants to write an article about his or her school (which IS exceedingly notable by the standards of the kids who go there) - but gets it shredded by the deletionists per-WP:SCHOOL is unlikely to become a full time editor in the future - that first experience with Wikipedia is the crucial one - and it's rarely as pleasant as it used to be (say) 5 years ago. The one who starts off by writing an article about his/her rather uninteresting highschool - and who gets tons of help and encouragement from the community - may well be the one who expands the stubs of 50 other high-importance articles about mathematics in the future.

SteveBaker (talk) 14:43, 18 March 2008 (UTC)

Thanks Steve, that seems like a very well thought out comment. I think I could get behind an inclusion standard which is based on the following:

1. Technical limitations: Since disc space and bandwidth isn't free, this is always our overriding concern, though it grows less significant each year
2. Verifiability: Each article (and fact therein) has to be verifiable from a reputable source
3. Privacy: No personal information (SIN, phone number, address etc.) can be posted unless such information is intentionally or well-known public knowledge
4. Not for advertisement or commercial use

Beyond that, I don't really see much problem with including anything. Having articles on pokemon, television series episodes, little league seasons, geneology and the like doesn't seem like a negative thing to me; after all, you're only going to find them if you look for them. Oberiko (talk) 20:23, 18 March 2008 (UTC)

I have a two word change...delete: "and bandwidth" in point (1). The bandwidth requirements for Wikipedia are overwhelmingly driven by the number of readers - not the number of articles. Unless increasing the number of articles (by adding articles about things like obscure high schools) brings us a lot of new readers, the only additional bandwidth caused by a relaxation of notability standards would be the bandwidth it takes to create and index these new articles - which is likely to be utterly negligable. If (as claimed) these articles will not be much read - then they won't attract new readers (or increase the number or size of articles that existing readers read). Hence a gentle and gradual deregulation of the notability criteria would not affect bandwidth significantly UNLESS it brought a lot more readers to the site - which would be "A Good Thing". Since a lot of these articles are going to be short stubs - it's arguable that the bandwidth to deliver an article about a less notable subject would be comparable to delivering an "Article not found" page - which is the logical alternative. As for your other three points - I'm certainly not advocating a change to existing verifiability, privacy or commercial use rules. SteveBaker (talk) 16:11, 19 March 2008 (UTC)

Oh how wrong wrong wrong: It is a noble (and perhaps even achievable) goal to have Wikipedia eventually contain all human knowledge

I can barely express how this statement thrilled me. Perhaps it is achievable for Wikipedia to contain all information (a thing that contains all information is commonly called the Universe, so beware), but definately not knowledge! Ask yourself what is knowledge? Knowledge is not a huge amount of information. Not the whole Universe. On the contrary, knowledge can be gained only by deleting 99% of information and choosing only the 1% (just a figure, it's really much-much less). Sometimes you have to actually delete not only useless information in the process, but sadly also the useful one. Just because it's too much for poor homo sapiens to comprehend at the moment. Therefore I find it natural for our culture, and for one's good mental health, to limit overflow of information. That's how it always worked. I believe Wikipedia should attempt to contain only the most notable part of human knowledge and constantly merge/redirect/delete. --Kubanczyk (talk) 14:13, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

The vision statement of the Wikimedia Foundation refers to "the sum of all knowledge", not "the sum of all notable knowledge". And notable to whom exactly? You talk about notability as if it's some objective value. If one person finds certain information "worthy" of their attention, another person may not. --Pixelface (talk) 22:16, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

But no! We can't let silly things like mission statements and fundamental principles get in the way of deleting worthless articles about TV shows! — Omegatron 01:41, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Wiki is not paper

Wiki is not paper. I will never read articles about Pokemon characters, but they cause no harm to the encyclopedia or my reading experience because I won't see them if I don't go looking for them. This is a non-issue. — Omegatron 00:35, 22 March 2008 (UTC)

Yes, they do cause harm, the very instant anyone out there decides not to donate because of legitimate concerns that Wikipedia is in fact an indiscriminate collection of trivia. The main problem with inclusionists is not the inclusionism at all. It's that they are opposed to any kind of encyclopedic standards as a consequence. Dorftrottel (canvass) 09:24, March 22, 2008

How often does this scenario happen? In the last round of donations, was there a rash of people leaving comments to this effect?--Nydas^(Talk) 21:02, 24 March 2008 (UTC)

Regardless of how people see us, our goal is to be an encyclopedia, not an indiscriminate source of information. Unless a topic is encyclopedic in nature, then it does not belong in the project. _(1 == 2)^Until 21:06, 24 March 2008 (UTC)

That argument is tautological, since we're actively redefining what encyclopedic means.--Nydas^(Talk) 09:53, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

Yes, they do cause harm, the very instant anyone out there decides not to donate because of legitimate concerns that Wikipedia is in fact an indiscriminate collection of trivia.

Do you have any evidence whatsoever that this has happened? I'm pretty confident that any money lost in this way is counterbalanced by a huge number of small donations from people who use the site for things that you personally consider unencyclopedic. We'll lost their monetary support if we remove these things from the project.

Unless a topic is encyclopedic in nature, then it does not belong in the project.

Define "encyclopedic".

I'd conjecture that most anything that people try to put into the encyclopedia is by definition encyclopedic. The main reason for notability guidelines, as I see it, is to prevent us from having a huge number of small, poorly-maintained, poor-quality articles; not because those articles are inherently unencyclopedic. — Omegatron 01:42, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

I can't say for sure that "inclusionism" has caused Wikipedia to lose fundraising money, but there's at least one case where "deletionism" has cost us money: [1] [2].

Indulging in demonizing hyperbole like "Inclusionists are opposed to any kind of encyclopedic standards" is foolish. The inclusionists I know, and there are many of them, are passionately dedicated to upholding encyclopedic standards. This passion causes them to reject any "get this shit out of my encyclopedia"-type arguments because they see that as a personal and prejudicial standard which runs contrary to actual objective "encyclopedic" standards.

We inclusionists want good-quality information, and as much of it as possible. We don't honor prejudiced attitudes toward specific subjects. If an article is verifiable, neutral (which bars self-promotion), and readable, we value it, and we see attempts to remove such information via AfD as process-abusive vandalism.

Unverifiable, unreadable, and non-neutral crap is crap. Why are we so incapable of unifying behind these true encyclopedic standards?--Father Goose (talk) 02:28, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

that wasn't so big. you just put in lots of line breaks. Equazcion •✗/C • 02:44, 26 Mar 2008 (UTC)

It was big in spirit.--Father Goose (talk) 04:00, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

Good example. Anyone have an example of the project losing donations because of inclusionism?

This is a minor point, anyway, though. We should be talking about how this content fits in with the goals of the project (sum of all human knowledge), and not so much about whether it makes money for the project. — Omegatron 23:35, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

Why would a more inclusioinist philosophy result in fewer donations? I, for one, would donate more if Wikipedia started hosting articles on more topics. Celarnor ^{Talk to me} 19:19, 2 April 2008 (UTC)

"Yes, they do cause harm, the very instant anyone out there decides not to donate because of legitimate concerns that Wikipedia is in fact an indiscriminate collection of trivia." Individual articles for Pokemon characters don't cause any harm to Wikipedia — although they may hurt Wikia's bottom line. They certainly don't pose as much harm as biographies for living people. Is Bulbasaur going to sue the Wikimedia Foundation for libel? Was it Charmander that killed JFK? The content disclaimer says "Readers should not judge the importance of topics based on their coverage in Wikipedia, nor assume that a topic is important merely because it is the subject of a Wikipedia article." I highly doubt that the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation waited to make a donation until TTN redirected all the Pokemon character articles. --Pixelface (talk) 22:51, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

Trash Namespace Proposal

There is a proposal to create a namespace that where deleted pages can still be accessed. This proposal represents a solution to the dilemma raised in the above-mentioned economist article that is compatible with the spirit of inclusionism while also addressing some of the concerns of those who wish to be more stringent about the removal of non-notable articles.

But what about the "I can edit this! Yay!" and the "**** **** ****" (in which **** is not censored) type articles? It would not be good to leave those in the trash namespace too. But there is a fine line between a self-bio that is advertising, for example, and a stub, but solid, bio. 68.101.123.219 (talk) 21:24, 30 March 2008 (UTC)

Some has already created something of this sort - see Deletionpedia. The existence of this makes AFD pointless. A better process is needed - a filter to identify good articles. But we have this already... Colonel Warden (talk) 11:46, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Don't template the regulars has been marked as a guideline

Wikipedia:Don't template the regulars (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs) has recently been edited to mark it as a guideline. This is an automated notice of the change (more information). -- VeblenBot (talk) 18:51, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

It's back to an essay, at least for the moment. There was extensive discussion on the related talk/discussion page. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 17:33, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

Colour of users in templates and icons revisited

An editor (above) suggests that the user icon gif is a display of unintentional bias. Many other editors (including me) disagreed. I still disagree about the tiny gif of the user icon, but there are several portals, projects and templates that use similar but larger images. Here are some examples-

(apologies for the huge list of editor names here, I'm using templates so it's not my fault. Obviously this comment is not about them.)

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Organized_Labour
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Contents/Portals
3. Template:WikiProject Sociology
4. Template:PortalReviewVolunteers
5. Template:WPBiography

So, one tiny little icon is ignorable, but can WP ignore all these icons all over the project? Dan Beale-Cocks 19:42, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

I dunno, those all look muppet-coloured, as someone put it, to me as well. SamBC(talk) 19:53, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

This reminds me of when Band-Aids used to be called "flesh tone". What would you prefer as a solution, D B-C? Keeper | 76 | Disclaimer 20:00, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

No matter what color they are, someone isn't going to be happy. I, for one, have black hair and do not own any green shirts. --Kbdank71 20:10, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

I like the muppet idea. What about making them Grover blue?. Elmo red? Shouldn't offend anyone, except perhaps really really cold or really really warm people. Keeper | 76 | Disclaimer 20:12, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

I did see a template that used red, green, blue, people. I can't remember which one it was. I don't know if it is a problem, and if it is a problem how serious it is. Muppet colored icons are spread across various wiki places, but it seems odd that I haven't found a single "black" (acceptable UK use) icon of a person in use. Maybe someone can point it out to me? I dunno, WP has enough problems with people "VIOLATATING THE MOS!!!1!" so I dread to think what a template standardisation project would have to go through. It would be nice to see a bit of variety. Dan Beale-Cocks 23:24, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

I consider neckties to be the work of the Devil. --Carnildo (talk) 18:53, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

Also, dark-colored tones are used on images with negative overtones, like in {{Sockmaster}}. (aw, come on, you know that I have a little of reason, even if I'm mainly joking) --Enric Naval (talk) 20:15, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Hehe. Dan Beale-Cocks 23:24, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

This is a possible "generic lady", where the 10 year-old artist has said: "Suddenly I felt God say, blend all the races, because this is Eve, the mother of all mankind." [3] - Doug Youvan (talk) 11:43, 10 April 2008 (UTC) Image:3SellersRoles.jpg possible "generic men"? - Doug Youvan (talk) 12:18, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

And then we'll get people complaining, "Aryanism! Anti-semitism!".--WaltCip (talk) 16:48, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

Walt - It took me a while to figure out your comment, but yes, Strangelove was a captured Nazi scientist. And Eve is common only to Abrahamic religions. So, I spent two hours on Google searching with permutations of blend, race, morp, image, man, etc. and found nothing but junk. However, I seem to recall that someone actually ran a morph on a weighted-average of human images and produced faces for an "average man" and an "average woman". Someone else should search if they can think of a critical key word to refine the search. - Doug Youvan (talk) 17:27, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

Still has the problem that too many people are not "average", and no matter what we change it to, even if it's a perfect average, we'll still get complaints of "But I'm not black/white/a muppet". There is no good solution to this, unless it's remove all person icons. --Kbdank71 18:08, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

Here is the composite human face thing. Looks an awful lot like the current icon IMO. How anyone gets male out of that icon is just beyond me. Or white for that matter. I assume all bias has been purged from the articles in the encyclopedia and we're working on this last bastion of white-maledom? Franamax (talk) 18:27, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

I should say again that this isn't about the tiny user.gif on every page. Weirdly, that icon comes from a set that has a "pink" and a "brown" icon, and WP uses the "brown" icon. So, that's cleared that complaint up. I don't want to see all icons replaced by a single "perfect human" icon, but I would like to see a bit of variety in the icons used to represent people. Maybe I should just find someone good at graphics and create some icons. Would people notice or care if a few icons in templates were changed? Probably not. Dan Beale-Cocks 19:44, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

Dan - Why don't we pick 12 dead people from the 20th century for the basis of your icons? As one of the twelve, I nominate Martin Luther King. Einstein is fairly obvious, too. - 20:20, 10 April 2008 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Nukeh (talk • contribs)

Whatever we do, we should not use a depiction of Muhammad. _(1 == 2)^Until 20:30, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

Or Jimmy Whales Doug Youvan (talk) 21:21, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

Ther should be icons!!!!! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.106.28.122 (talk) 18:04, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

Veifiability for categories and templates

Recently I have encountered several categories and templates of which the reason for compilation are at best contestable. However, neither Wikipedia:Templates for Deletion nor Wikipedia:Categories for discussion gives any reference that a category or template that fails to have verifiable, reliable information that is not the product of original research is a ground for removal.

A lot of information is templated. There should be a way to check this information against the guidelines all information needs to be checked against.
Categorisation is a difficult thing, which leads to heated scientific debates in the scientific community. The haphazard categorisation of Wikipedia works for many topics, but there are also many topics where categorisations leads to debates (e.g. ethnic, religious etc.). In these debates verifiability is hardly an issue.

If there is no guideline for this, both categories and templates provide a backdoor to add unsourced information to many articles. This of course opens up a possibility for subtle NPOV pushing.

Is there any way to make a guideline to cover for this.

Personally I was thinking that templates and categories need a references section in their own page. That would not burden every article with the need to reference, while it does fit the rules. I have not seen this anywhere though; so I am pretty sure this is not a rule yet.

Do you have any idea/suggestion how to handle this issue?

(Sorry if this has come up before, this is my first post here). Arnoutf (talk) 19:54, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

It seems to me that most categories and templates are uncontroversial aids to navigation, so we shouldn't make things more difficult for ourselves by imposing additional restrictions. Where controversies do arise, they are settled either as content disputes (on the article talk pages), or as proposals to rename or delete categories and templates (WP:CfD, WP:TfD). The main problem as I see it is simply widely inconsistent use of categories (and unwillingness on the part of developers to consider software improvements to help efforts to make them more consistent, if my recent experiences at Bugzilla are anything to go by).--Kotniski (talk) 19:41, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

I agree this is the case for most templates and categories. However some template, like Template:emotion imply categorisation/inclusion of terms (what is an emotion?) that is contested even between the scientific experts in the field. Some categories such as Category:Anti-Islam sentiment are maintained through several CfD's. I think at least templates should list their sources somewhere under the same restrictions as articles (ie likely to be contested information needs a ref). We should implement this lightly, I agree. Arnoutf (talk) 20:17, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

Should WP:SELFPUB be reorganized?

I have requested comment here regarding whether WP:SELFPUB should be reorganized to make its meaning more clear. I have explained why I feel it is a good idea, and why it is not, in my opinion, a substantive change. I once did make that edit but was quickly reverted by someone who insisted that the existing wording is perfectly clear and that my distinction was "improper", despite my explanations. My basic reason for this is that five of the restrictions seem to apply to the specific material referenced, while the other two are more general, and the way it is stated now could be misleading. PSWG1920 (talk) 17:45, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

Email for referencing?

Over the last few days, an editor has been adding unreferenced content to several US municipality pages. When I warned him/her about it, s/he said that s/he would get in contact (I'd assume by email, since these municipalities are scattered nationwide) with the locals. Is an email from an official good enough for referencing? I'm inclined to tell the editor that it's not good enough, since an email isn't published and therefore cannot be a reliable source. Help, please? Nyttend (talk) 01:09, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

Email is not a reliable source at all. It's easy to fake, since there's no way to prove who wrote it or where it came from. We also don't take letters sent to someone, as there's no way for anyone else to verify its authenticity. Any info needs to be in a published source, preferably a third-party one (magazine, newspaper, etc.). Referencing primary sources (ie. published by the municipality itself in pamphlets and so forth) should only be used for non-controversial facts. -- Kesh (talk) 02:45, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

Err, isn't email integral to our process of authenticating claims for PD-Self etc on uploads to Commons? LeadSongDog (talk) 03:04, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

But the thing with the pictures is that, when a person uploads a picture and adds a PD tag, we trust that person's claim to have taken it themselves, unless it's obviously not. Similarly, when an email is sent by the photographer, we trust that person, unless we have reason to do otherwise. This isn't an OCRS question: the other editor apparently is going to email these local people and tell me what they said. I'm not inclined to trust that. Nyttend (talk) 03:56, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

Yeah, but don't confuse the question of RS with the form of publication or integrity of attribution. If the various emails go directly to one or more trusted repositories (not via the editor) we should be able to trust they were sent as recorded. This doesn't solve the forged headers problem, but a confirmation bounce can do that. Unfortunately that still only gets you a primary source. You then need a secondary source to publish based on that before you've got something useful as a reference. It could be done, but I doubt it's what the editor had in mind.LeadSongDog (talk) 07:34, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

I understand what you mean. The point is that the editor wants the locals to email the editor. Nyttend (talk) 14:52, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

free media cat

As of now {{free media}} is only used on some free image templates (168,000 out of ~300,000). I think it should be used on all free images to make it easier to sort free content. Its similar to {{non-free media}} and would standardize the practice to group all media into one of the two possible categories. MBisanz ^talk 03:41, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

if high use templates where not protected I would do it myself. β^{_{command 2}} 14:17, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

I don't see any real problem with it... SQL^{Query me!} 15:25, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Non-free content criteria--criterion 8 dispute

This follows up on a discussion over proposed rewording of the criterion that was advertised here on March 28, pursuant to a discussion on the policy Talk page that began on March 17. Discussion of the proposal (formally made the day before it was advertised here) was lively, detailed, and mission-minded and a clear, unambiguous consensus was reached in support of the revised wording. The change was enacted on April 1.

On April 10, two editors acting on their own initiative, without ever having participated in the discussion or responded to it over the next nine days, and without making even an attempt to forge a new consensus, preemptively reverted the change. I need to make clear that I reverted them, on the basis that substantive changes should never be made to policy language without our standard process of consensus building, let alone in open defiance of that process. The end result is that the page is locked, with a dispute tag. And our entire non-free content policy is brought into disrepute. All comments are welcome here on the non-free content Talk page.—DCGeist (talk) 05:32, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

I'd like to second what Dan Geist says here. It augurs badly for WP's culture of consensus generation that one or two people can stomp in weeks after a widely advertised and lengthy consensus-generation process and reverse it, flying in the face of due process. TONY (talk) 06:13, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

It also augurs badly that seven people voting to change a core Foundation policy can be touted as "consensus". Very few people who actually deal with fair-use on a daily basis saw that conversation going on - it needed, at the least, to be at WP:AN. I have VPP bookmarked and missed it. Incidentally, IMHO, the only thing that brings our non-free content policy into disrepute is when people try to actually water it down to allow more use of non-free content. Black Kite 06:27, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

Rather POV, Black Kite. Balance required here. TONY (talk) 10:55, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

Debate now centralized at: Wikipedia:NFCC Criterion 8 debate. --Kim Bruning (talk) 11:00, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia:BLP subject response

I have written a new proposal which would allow subjects of BLPs to provide an on-wiki response to his or biography and have it linked to from the article. Any comments, improvements, rejections, and advice would be much appreciated. (This is my first attempt at proposing policy, so please go easy on me...) Sjakkalle (Check!) 07:16, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

Foreign Language Sources

This is the English Wikipedia. It's all well and good saying that it's the encyclopedia that anybody can edit, but if a statement is cited with a foreign language source, the majority of editors simply cannot have anything to do with it. I therefor suggests that, as anybody capable of citing with a foreign languuage is capable of translating it, they post a translation of the source on the talk page of the article, under a title referring precisely to the cited statement.

Otherwise (or perhaps, as well), we need to be able to verify that a foreign language source says what it's claimed to say. Sometimes the precise wording of a source in itself is significant.

In short, there's a problem with foreign language sources - particularly with reference to contraversial articles, and even more so where they are on the subject of curent events. What can be done about it?—Preceding unsigned comment added by Crimsone (talk • contribs) 17:08, April 11, 2008

Posting a translation of foreign language sources on the talk page (or anywhere else) cannot be done since a full translation will probably be a violation of copyright. As for a lack of comprehension of non-English sources... there are many free translation services online that do a fairly good job of translating text (or websites) into English. Another option is to request the assistance of an editor who has expressed that s/he understands the language (see Category:Available translators in Wikipedia and Category:Wikipedians by language). Black Falcon ^(Talk) 18:37, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

What I've done on Natalee Holloway is include my translation of the quote in the article, and included the Dutch text of the original source as a part of the footnote. Doesn't work well for summarizing large blocks of text, but it's good when you just need to get support for an isolated fact.Kww (talk) 18:51, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

There is, however, nothing wrong with posting a translation of the relevant part - ie, the part on which the citation is based. The trouble is, many articles simply move too quickly to seek the assistance ofd someone that speaks the relevant language... and actually, my experience of online translators is that when deling with real language, the do a dire job if the outcome is intended for any serious purpose... babelfish, for examp[le, I'm sure almost deliberately mistranslates... Google is often better, but it's still not right. They don't cover all languages either, and it STILL doesn't solve the problem of the unreliability of translation...

An EN-Wikipedia "translation helpdesk" might be a solution, as if there are groups of users dedicating themselves to translation, then said translations are easily opemn to the checking of other translators.Crimsone (talk) 19:24, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

For many countries (i.e. related languages), there is now a project. We might recruit volunteers for translations services through the country projects; that would allow us to find people who have at least some control of both english and another language in a focussed way (i.e. you would go to wikiproject Germany for German and wikiproject France for French) Arnoutf (talk) 19:37, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

urls

There should not be (blacklisted) blocked URLs! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.106.28.122 (talk) 17:58, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

• Oh yes, in an ideal world, there should not be blocked URLs. Since however in the real world, we encounter spam and the like, a blacklist becomes necessary. Unfortunately. --B. Wolterding (talk) 19:44, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

Challenging Identity

A new account is created in the real name of a notable person (Author/Journalist). They edit their own article a little and one on a major historical news story in which they were involved. Judging from the nature of the edits. I would assume good faith and believe it to be the person, but if in fact it isn't the person the user account is an act of extreme bad faith. The eprson needs educating about Wikipedia's citation requirements, but that apart, they could potentially be a valuable contributor. Question: Is there any formal process for querying the identity of a user and their verifying it (and is it sufficiently polite that they won't take umbrage?). dramatic (talk) 09:35, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia:USERNAME#Real names is what you want, I think. — Trust not the Penguin (T | C) 09:40, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

(e/c) Please see Wikipedia:Username policy#Real names. In short, we need proof of real identity, such users can be blocked, and they can clear up the matter user the OTRS system. From what you've said, there are BLP issues here that scream out for a block coupled with a cautionary revert, and an immediate informative, polite message on the talk page explaining what the problem is, why these seemingly draconian measures are necessary and what the user needs to do.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 09:43, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

Thanks to both of you. dramatic (talk) 18:48, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

Image Placeholders

A discussion concerning the use of image placeholders has opened at Wikipedia:Centralized discussion/Image placeholders and may be of interest to editors at the village pump. The placeholder images have recently been uploaded to 50,000 articles, and while there has been disagreement about the use of these images in various corners, there has not been a centralized discussion on this issue affecting the community. Please contribute your thoughts and publicize this discussion anywhere you feel would be appropriate. Thank you. Northwesterner1 (talk) 10:41, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

My 2 cent's worth: I think images are already something of a "master grade" only task. Very few people understand enough to get them to show up where they are supposed to be on the page. If the placeholders could be turned into an easy to use feature it might work. Otherwise you'd just end up with clutter. Easiest would be if you had a button in the icon list above the editing window where contributors could request images. They could then even add a link to a picture they can't use because of policy. Lisa4edit —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.236.23.111 (talk) 13:37, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

Anti-National Sentiment Guidelines/Policy

I've been editing the anti-Americaism article. I've been looking at some other anti-national sentiment articles, that were mentioned in the (archived) Talk pages of the article. They all tend to push POV on political matters. The anti-Japanese article, for example, has a section on whaling protests, calling the opposition to whaling racism against Japanese [4]. Meanwhile, the anti-Americanism article cites a protest against a US military base, in the wake of Marines raping a child, as an example of anti-Americanism. (The article has a "Discrimination" sidebar that comes and goes, and includes anti-Americanism in the same category as racism, slavery, and genocide.) All of this is interpreting and labeling the views of other people and societies, often negatively, on political matters.

Proposal: anti-[national sentiment] articles should only be about people who self-declare as anti-[nation]. There are people who describe themselves as anti-American. There can be a neutral article about them and what they believe. Other labeling--anti-Mexican sentiment (the article suggests concern with illegal immigration is prejudice against Mexicans [5]....), anti-Americanism, etc--is just POV pushing, usually with a negative innuendo, often about living people and other ethnicities.

Here's what I wonder: Is it possible to have a policy about this, or is Wikipedia too de-centralized for something like that? Life.temp (talk) 13:55, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

In fact the Japan thing names it Japanophobia. I think verifiable sources and no original research would already help. Arnoutf (talk) 14:07, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

OK, I found a related policy: Naming conventions (identity) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Naming_conventions_%28identity%29

I propose anti-[nationality] labeling following the same guidlelines, pretty much for the same reasons. From that page:

Where there is doubt, aim for neutrality.

• Some terms are considered pejorative, or have negative associations, even if they are quite commonly used. Even though people may use these terms themselves, they may not appreciate being referred to by such terms by others (for example, faggot, nigger, tranny). Note that neutral terminology is not necessarily the most common term — a term that the person or their cultural group does not accept for themselves is not neutral even if it remains the most widely used term among outsiders. Life.temp (talk) 14:08, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

Enforce policy even on April 1

I know I'm immediately going to sound like a killjoy (and a hypocrite, since this April 1 I tried to get in on the fun by jokingly noming WP:AIV for deletion myself, something which I promise never to do again), but I've thought about it and I've come to the conclusion that we should be stricter about disruptive behavior that takes place on April 1. The main reason why is that it divides us. Look at a recent Wikipedia Signpost article and how many users were blocked, then unblocked for April Fools Day "pranks". Some of us may find this stuff funny, but others apparently don't. There are ways to be funny without dividing us. A humorous featured article is an example of one. Be creative, people. And don't even get me started on how people just visitng Wikipedia for the first time view these "pranks".--Urban Rose 16:18, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

We have two choices, we fight these violations all day April 1st, and they stop at midnight, or we only deal with serious issues only and revert at the end of the day and they stop at midnight.

It is just a day, and you can't hold back the tide. We can use common sense, block when it is truly disruptive, and otherwise just wait it out. _(1 == 2)^Until 16:22, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

Perhaps the only thing that should be fooled around with are the tabs that admins can see, or perhaps just logged in users, but there should be no change visible by ip users, they expect more from wikipedia. I like the idea of humourous FAs though--Phoenix-wiki 16:24, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

If Wikipedians decided to treat such acts like they would any other day of the year they would stop. The reason we have to fight them is because nothing is really done about them. No one is ever really blocked or desysoped for them. In fact, just to set an example, I recommend that you give me a twenty-four hour block for what I so foolishly did on April 1st.--Urban Rose 16:29, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

Nevermind about the block. That would just be punitive.--Urban Rose 16:30, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

Would Wikipedia benefit from blocking or desysoping people for an April 1st day joke? Would that be preventative when the day is going to end anyways? Is it to prevent them from doing it next year?

I also will point out that if a joke crosses the line and is truly offensive or harmful then appropriate action is likely to occur despite the day on the calender. _(1 == 2)^Until 16:33, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

So basically what you're asking is "What's the point of enforcing policy? They'll just stop anyway." Well most vandals will stop vandalizing eventually so maybe we should just stop blocking them. The reason Wikipedia should block and desysop people for vandalism April Fools Day pranks is to show them that are policies aren't something to just toss around and to put an end to this division that these "pranks" cause. I never realized how much they hurt people until I tried one myself. I've regretted it to this day. If you want to joke around, take it to Uncyclopedia.--Urban Rose 16:41, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

No, that is not what I am saying. My point is that Wikipedia will have a net loss if be block/desysop people for playing jokes on April 1st. Keep in mind I agree that jokes that cause a serious problem should be actionable. But the fact is regardless of the day people are more likely to get a warning than a block for playing silly buggers with AfD. _(1 == 2)^Until 16:44, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

"it's just a day" - but it is spread out over several timezones. Dan Beale-Cocks 16:47, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

Well that changes everything... oh wait, no it doesn't. :) _(1 == 2)^Until 16:48, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

If we made it clear that this joking was to stop, we wouldn't have a net loss of users because they would know that we mean business. We don't have a net loss of admins any other day of the week for them trying to post garbage on the main page. And when you mention the harm that the pranks cause, you only refer to the immediate harm. You don't refer to the division that it causes. I agree that a few bogus afds doesn't cause a huge amount of harm in themselves, but the division that these pranks cause by offending more than a few users who don't find them funny at all isn't worth what little humor can be found in the pranks themselves. Just ask User:Daniel if he finds them funny. He won't even speak to me after what I did.--Urban Rose 16:52, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

This is probably best continued at Wikipedia talk:Pranking, where a discussion about how the extent to which we ought to enforce general behavior and content policies and practices on 1 April has been underway for some time. Joe 00:39, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

Policy regarding Information in Infoboxes

I want to know that is there any specific policy regarding filling in the fields of infoboxes(specially Template:Infobox Officeholder). I am asking it after watching some editors removing the sect written along with religion in the religion field of Template:Infobox Officeholder, with the reasoning that only religion is asked in this field. In my point of view if there isn't any policy then one should be there, at least a guideline. --SMS ^Talk 19:22, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

Self-Published Sources

It seems patently illogical in the internet age to disclude self-published sources under the absurd garbage-can label of "vanity press". It should be obvious to anyone in the information age that self-published sources are increasingly important sources of information, and can represent reliable and rigorous research. To assign validity entirely to what publishers choose to print, given their dependence upon the market, or their dependence upon self-referential institutional guidelines, is also illogical, because truth is dependent neither upon popularity nor particular institutionalized schools of thought. While the market may provide one indication that many people find value in a source, it is not the sole criterion of truth. And when it comes to schools of thought, the people are entitled to access to information generated outside the box. Self-publishing, while it may indeed provide opportunities for "vanity" publishing consisting of flippant, nonserious work, also constitutes competition against attempts to monopolize validity, and represents a healthy source of dissent. Unless wikipedia wishes to confine its information entirely within manufactured consent, a more open policy about the inclusion of self-published sources is in order. CarlaO'Harris (talk) 19:58, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

Comment: This posting appears to be prompted by a dispute at Viktor Rydberg, related to the appropriateness of an external link. --- Barek (talk • contribs) - 20:30, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

It is a general point, about many articles on Wikipedia, but does have application to that debate as well. CarlaO'Harris (talk) 22:12, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

Per WP:SELFPUB (part of the Verifiability policy), self-published sources can be cited, in limited circumstances (very limited if you take it literally.) I do think the criteria should be loosened, but right now I'm just trying to get it reorganized to make it more clear and perhaps make individual points a bit easier to discuss. PSWG1920 (talk) 23:30, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

Complete bot policy rewrite

The bot policy rewrite mentioned in a section above has gone live. Community input would be appreciated on WT:BOT to ensure that the changes have consensus and to discuss the possibility of further changes.--Dycedarg ж 20:48, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

Please consider taking the AGF Challenge

I would like to invite you to consider taking part in the AGF Challenge which has been proposed for use in the RfA process [6] by User: Kim Bruning. You can answer in multiple choice format, or using essay answers, or anonymously. You can of course skip any parts of the Challenge you find objectionable or inadvisable.--Filll (talk) 14:16, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia:CheckUser has been marked as a policy

Wikipedia:CheckUser (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs) has recently been edited to mark it as a policy. This is an automated notice of the change (more information). -- VeblenBot (talk) 18:51, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

Question about 3RR policy

I was told that all edits made in a consecutively (in a row within a 24 hour period) are counted as one for the purpose of 3RR violations. For example:

• Editor One makes 17 edits in a row (within 24 hours). These are counted as one edit.
• Editor Two makes one edit.
• Editor One 18 more edits in a row (within 24 hours) and these are counted as one edit.
• Editor Two makes one edit.
• Editor One makes 23 edits in a row (within 24 hours) that are counted as one edit.
• Editor Two makes one edit.
• Editor One makes 16 edits in a row (with in a 24 hours) that count as one edit.

Etc.

Is this the way it works? I have read the 3RR policy but I am not clear. Thanks, Mattisse (Talk) 21:58, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

That would depend on whether the effect of the multiple consecutive edits was to revert the other editor's changes or not. If an editor makes a bunch of changes, is reverted, and then makes a bunch of substantially different changes, that would probably not be counted as a revert.

Really though, the important part isn't the technicalities. If you follow the basic principle of not edit warring, you should be fine. --erachima formerly tjstrf 00:13, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

Restating: all consecutive edits are considered a single edit for the purpose of 3RR. So in the example you listed, above, for the purpose of 3RR blocks, editor One has made (essentially) only 3 edits, and won't be automatically blocked.

I also note that "(within 24 hours)" is irrelevant. If an editor makes 17 consecutive edits over a 36-hour period, for example, that's considered a single edit for 3RR purposes. But of course if there isn't anyone else editing the article during that 36-hour period, then there isn't any edit war going on. (In your example, it's hard to believe that editor One would be able to make so many consecutive edits, if in fact editors One and Two were involved in a revert war. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 01:06, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

Humm. Well, thank you very much for your answer. The 3RR thing has always an arbitrary mystery and now I see why. So one person can made 74 edits and another can make 3 and get a 3RR block. I can see now why I get so scared when I edit articles! I think I will definately go to a policy of no editing with other editors. Thanks! Mattisse (Talk) 01:27, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

In theory only, yes. In actual practice, it would be a cold day in hell before that ever happened. Also, I think you're missing that the guy who made the 3 (or rather, 4) edits made exactly the same amount of change to the article text, he just did it all at once rather than in a billion little pieces. --erachima formerly tjstrf 01:31, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

Really, if its more than a minor edit (reverting vandalism etc), just add "take it to talk" in the edit summary, then do so. Hash it out there, not in the article. —Preceding unsigned comment added by LeadSongDog (talk • contribs) 01:39, 29 March 2008

It does happen, and the block comes as the editor is off on another article and loses everything written because it cannot be saved. (My notepad editor can't same wiki formating). Best not to edit where than danger might arise, I think. Mattisse (Talk) 02:28, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

<undent> The other thing is, 3RR is, as they say, "an electric fence not an entitlement". In other words, if Editor 2 continues to revert Editor 1 with no discussion, they can be blocked for edit warring and disruptive editing whether they revert 3 edits in a day or 30 edits in a month. Confusing Manifestation(Say hi!) 03:59, 4 April 2008 (UTC)

Has no-one else ever found it a bit weird that a vandal who makes 4 (or 40) obviously destructive edits to various articles has to receive a warning and to reoffend before they can even be considered for a block, whereas a careless editor who forgets about 3RR and happens to make four good-faith reverts to an article can be blocked summarily forthwith? --Kotniski (talk) 15:18, 4 April 2008 (UTC)

Good faith edit warring? Mr.Z-man 16:48, 4 April 2008 (UTC)

Well, better faith than out-and-out vandalism anyway. The vandal gets the softly-softly treatment, whereas the "edit warrior" (who may well not even be the primary aggressor) gets the smack in the face.--Kotniski (talk) 09:39, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

First off, and this may or may not help answer your question, 3RR does not apply to vandalism reverts. One can make as many of those as necessary. Preventing reverts in less clear cut areas is more controversial, I would assume, and in these cases 3RR is instated not as a punishment but a reminder to users that they need to communicate. —  scetoaux (T|C) 05:26, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

So what's wrong with a simple reminder then, perhaps in the form of a warning like vandals get, rather than an immediate block? And to both/all parties in the edit war, not just the one who happens to have chalked up four reverts.--Kotniski (talk) 15:46, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

That's basically what Template:Uw-3rr is supposed to be. It informs the user of policy and their impending block, while at the same time informs the user that the solution to edit warring is to bring the issue to the article's talk page.

I propose a policy change in which, like blocks for vandalism, a user needs to have received some sort of final warning with regards to 3RR before being blocked for 24 hours. —  scetoaux (T|C) 17:41, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

Support, per my arguments above.--Kotniski (talk) 09:04, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

(And proposal notified to WP:3RR and WP:AN/3RR.)--Kotniski (talk) 13:11, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

Oppose. It already states in the header of WP:AN/3RR that Administrators are unlikely to block a user who has never been warned. The admins who handle that noticeboard don't follow a mechanical rule on whether blocks are appropriate, and they use discretion. In practice it's unlikely that a user who goes over 3RR by sheer inadvertence will get into any trouble there. (That is, a user who is not intending to edit war). Such a person is more likely to receive a warning. Even vandals can't assume they will always get a final warning. Some vandal behavior is so egregious that it gets blocked without further ado, and I believe that's correct. EdJohnston (talk) 13:39, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

I agree that's how it should be, in both cases, but the current wording of the policies in question fails to make that clear; in fact they imply quite the opposite. So maybe it's a rewording of the policy pages we need rather than actually a change of policy, if current practice among administrators really is as you describe.--Kotniski (talk) 13:51, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

Sometimes in vicious edit wars (I have seen mutual 3RR violations with offensive summaries accumulating within 10 minutes). In such cases immediate blocking (of both sides without warning) can be the best thing to calm down the war; and create a bit of stability on mainspace. So no, I would not take away that possibility from the admins. Arnoutf (talk) 11:23, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

You may be right in practice, but it sounds a bit like breaking up a fist-fight by shooting both parties dead. Why not a warning to all sides first, and if that doesn't work, go ahead with blocks.--Kotniski (talk) 19:51, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

One can revert 4 times in 24 hours without doing any editwarring, in my opinion: on different parts of the article, perhaps without noticing one is violating 3RR. In such a case it seems probably reasonable to issue a warning rather than a block. However, I'm not sure I want to restrict admins. I think there's a benefit to expecting people to keep a count of their own reverts; otherwise people might get in the habit of regularly doing 3 reverts a day, relying on warnings rather than self-discipline. Is there an existing problem that this proposed policy change is intended to address? ☺Coppertwig (talk) 15:01, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

The downsides to blocking must be fairly apparent (blockee can't contribute to WP for a certain period; blockee is psychologically deterred from contributing in the future or encouraged to act destructively; wastes admin time if the block is contested; generally creates a confrontational atmosphere etc.). Anything that encourages admins to act in the more community-sensitive spirit of WP:BLOCK rather than the take-your-punishment spirit of 3RR's current wording, and encourages editors (particularly those who think they can use 3RR as a weapon) to expect them to act so, has to be a good thing.--Kotniski (talk) 14:40, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

Deleted article

Hello, I am 90% of my wikitime present in the Dutch Wikipedia. I recently made an article here for a life coach David Bonham-Carter in my drafts. It was not very long but it had references to a source and I had contact with that man by e-mail. But very soon (after 2 hours) after transfer to the main section, my article was tagged for deletion; main reason: not notable enough. I consented with this opinion and added the tag/template db-author or sth. like this. Now today I come back here and click "my contributions" and I cannot see there any trace of

• having written this article
• the deletion of this article
• a commentary after searching "David Bonham-Carter" like: this article existed, but was removed. Do you reconsider to write it again. Please look first into the deletion log (book)

In our nl.wikipedia.org you will find these signs of past activity without saying.

What the policy here in the mother/father of all wikipedia's ?

Frankly, I am cross by the idea I cannot see under "my contributions" my complete activity, i.e. by means of a red title (= removed/no more existing) David Bonham-Carter on the corresponding correct dates (the making; the editing; the deletion date). And clicking on logs next to my user name I see that the deletion log for Dartelaar is empty. If you answer here, can you put a link in "my talk", please. --Dartelaar [write me!] 21:54, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

You can see that an article was deleted here [7]. Unfortunately, on the English-language Wikipedia, editors aren't allowed to see their deleted contributions. I am unaware of any good reason for this, but that's the way it is. DuncanHill (talk) 22:06, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

You can ask an admin to "userfy" the article. It will get copied into your userspace, with all its history intact, so you can copy it before it gets deleted again after a while. --Enric Naval (talk) 22:32, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

I agree here, sorry. Only admins can see "deleted contributions" on English-wikipedia. You can come to my talkpage (I'm an admin) if you'd like the article "userfied" (which means it will go to your userspace instead of the article/mainspace.) Thanks, Keeper | 76 | Disclaimer 22:35, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

Is there, incidentally, any good reason for this policy? I mean, obviously if something is illegal or potentially corrupting to the morals it might be permanently removed, but in such a way that even administrators can't see it. Administrators are people too, so if they are permitted to see a piece of text, is there any reason why us slightly lesser mortals shouldn't see it also?--Kotniski (talk) 07:37, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Don't you know, admins aren't anything special or superior on Wikipedia, they're the same as normal editors but with a few more buttons to push - or as some admins joke they just have a mop and bucket. :) Everyone is equal on Wikipedia, but admins are more equal than others, and some are downright above any and all policy :) Rfwoolf (talk) 09:49, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Admins aren't special or superior, it's just some of them think that they are. Seriously, there is no good reason whatsoever why deleted contributions shouldn't shew up as redlinks in the "my contributions" page, and if they did shew up like that, it would be easier for editors to review their own edits to see where they were going wrong. But it'd reduce the difference between admins and non-admins, so you won't see many admins supporting a change like that. DuncanHill (talk) 12:33, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Actually, there are technical limitations on why deleted edits don't show up on your page (or the page of any editor who does not have admin tools); that's why they are deleted edits. Most of the deleted edits deal with deleted articles, and there isn't much of a reason to see them, unless you are trying to recreate a deleted article or establish a pattern of behavior for a block, checkuser, or arbcom case. Horologium (talk) 15:18, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

I think wanting to review one's own contributions with the intent of improving them is an excellent reason to see what has disappeared. I'm not suggesting that the content of the deleted edit be visible, just the fact that something has been deleted. Another good reason for being able to see them is when an admin makes an unjustified and unjustifiable slur on an editor's contributions, based on the admin's inability to understand that editor's deleted contributions (a situation I have been in). It is hard to defend one's contributions when one is not allowed to see them. As for them being needed for block, checkuser and arbcom cases, admins might spend less time complaining about the lack of support they get from non-admins if non-admins were actually able to see what was being talked about. DuncanHill (talk) 15:29, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

The problem with your proposal is that it would require totally reworking the way that deleted contributions are handled by the MediaWiki software. All deleted contributions (images, text, whatever) are treated as a single batch; what you propose is to seperate this one batch into a bunch of little batches, with a sort function to flag deleted edits by a particular user, and allow non-admins to see a list of deleted edits by user. It may be technically feasible, but it sounds like a lot of effort (and a potentially significant drain on resources) for what is likely to be minimal gain, and while you may use the information for honorable purposes, there is a potential for gaming the system using such a resource by editors who are not out to improve Wikipedia. If you wish to see a list of your deleted contributions, it is likely that there is an admin out there somewhere who will provide you with a list. Any takers? Horologium (talk) 15:43, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Sorry, I wrote the below before I saw the above. I understand that there are software limitations, but I don't see why, if the software allows admins to see something, it can't be quite easily tweaked (or simply configured) to allow non-admins (or at least "established users") to see the same thing.--Kotniski (talk) 16:08, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

That's confusing software settings and legal issues for WP policy -- it's not "you can't see deleted edits because we HATE you," it's "you can't see deleted edits because they're stored in a completely different database table and some of them are legally or ethically problematic, and there's no reliable way to sort the wheat from the chaff." I've seen proposals which would allow users to see their own deleted edits (or at least a list of deleted pages they've edited), which seems agreeable but still requires software changes -- I believe it's live on bugzilla at the moment. – Luna Santin (talk) 05:35, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

Well, thanks for finally supplying some real arguments, but I don't see that sorting the wheat from the chaff needs to be all that difficult. Pages which are deleted because of legal/ethical issues get referred to oversight, as I understand it; any others (the vast majority, I suspect) could remain accessible.--Kotniski (talk) 10:30, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

Not as true as you might think; revision and page deletion remain frequently used in cases of libel and copyright infringement, either of which can be quite problematic and neither of which is routinely oversighted. There is frequent confusion and debate regarding the suitability of various oversight requests (not to mention users who aren't even aware of oversight), and that being the case many users opt to request deletion even when oversight might be more appropriate. – Luna Santin (talk) 21:33, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

<unindenting> Agree with Duncan, except that you are suggesting that the content of the deleted edit be visible, aren't you? At least it would seem so from the rest of what you wrote. There actually seem to be a few issues here, and I'm not sure what would be involved in getting each of them changed. Let's try a list:

• Non-admins having access to deleted content. No reason has yet been given why we shouldn't have. What would have to happen to effect a change though? Presumably the software allows for this possibility, and it would just require a software configuration change for (en) Wikipedia? Who would have to approve that? The Foundation? The developers? JW? Does anyone actually know??
• Deleted pages remaining on contributions lists. As above, although I'd be less surprised if this actually required a software tweak.
• Delete actions showing up on watchlists. This hasn't been raised here yet, but just to cheer everyone up (I hope not prematurely) I did read on Bugzilla recently that this problem is close to being resolved, and that logged actions (deletes, moves, protects) relating to watched articles will shortly start showing up on watchlists.

--Kotniski (talk) 16:01, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

See this mediawiki revision. They are visible on watchlists now (it works on mine anyway). Woody (talk) 16:06, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

You're right (at least, I checked it for moves; hopefully deletes work as well). Hurrah! I'm off to see if the watchlist help page has been updated.--Kotniski (talk) 16:24, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Non-admins having access to deleted content - Which defeats the purpose of deletion. So then we'd have deletion 2, or else oversight might be used much more often. (copy-vio, attack pages, merely opposing consensus, true vandals, and a myriad of other not-so-nice reasons.) Doesn't sound like a good idea. That said, I think allowing users to have a listing of (only) their own deleted contributions in a non-clickable (non-viewable) list could be a good thing. - jc37 16:12, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Well, I think the purpose of deletion is to get stuff out of the encyclopedia, not off the server completely. Totally inappropriate content should be (and is) removed so that not even admins can see it. You don't explain what makes admins so different as a species that they can be trusted to "see" stuff that the rest of us can't. (I have nothing against admins by the way, they do a great job.) Deleted edits (including some disgustingly offensive vandalism) are already visible to the general public via page histories, so why should deleted articles be any different?--Kotniski (talk) 16:24, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

(response to Woody)Doesn't help if an admin decides to criticize your contributions because some articles which you (say) mended a dablink on subsequently get deleted and you hadn't watchlisted them, you are still left unable to defend oneself. DuncanHill (talk) 16:14, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

That was a while ago Duncan, and it was only one admin. If anyone needs to see a list of their deleted contributions, then most admins will be happy to oblige. I agree with Jc37 on this, oversight would be needed an awful lot more if everyone could see everyone elses deleted contributions. Being able to view your own would be a great idea. Woody (talk) 16:17, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Others being able to view one's own deleted contributions is what is needed to show up incompetence. DuncanHill (talk) 16:30, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Yep I agree there, and that sounds reasonable, though it might be hard to implement at the software level. Woody (talk) 16:41, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Not sure that Woody really meant that, but I agree that all members of the community should have the ability to see others' deleted content, both for the reason Duncan gives (it ensures that administrative actions are subject to scrutiny) and, for example, that if someone wants to write an article on a topic where a previous one was deleted, they can see what the previous content was and avoid making the same "mistakes". I don't see why there would be any increased need for oversight - the same criteria for oversight deletion would presumably apply as now (though I admit to being rather ignorant in that area). There also shouldn't be much software reworking involved; you would simply extend certain rights that admins now have to all users (or established users).--Kotniski (talk) 16:51, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

No I don't think I do either. I must have misread it somehow. What I do think is, the huge amounts of crap that get uploaded and deleted everyday do not need to be seen and the copyrighted stuff etc should not be seen by everyone. Under Duncan's system I think this would be visible. There is no need for it to be. I agree that it would be useful for long-term contributers to see their own material that has been deleted but I don't see what is so bad about asking an admin to have a look at it? I think that you should only be able to see your own deleted contributions if you want to "self-improve." Woody (talk) 18:03, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

So what you're talking about is (only) going to an individual user's "contributions" page, and seeing a link to "Deleted contributions", which you could click on to see the list of deleted contibutions? Maybe. But I can still think of ways that that can be abused. Though I "think" I'd support being able to see the list without being able to click on each individual link (thus, without actually being able to view the actual edits). - jc37 17:48, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

I love it when people know what I think.—Preceding unsigned comment added by Woody (talk • contribs) 18:03, 9 April 2008

How about when they're attempting to ascertain what you're attempting to convey? (Or did you, in your obvious arrogance in responding, miss the question marks?) Not to digress into too much of a tangent, but really, if you want to see a proposal go past proposal stage, perhaps being willing to further and further clarify might be a skill you may wish to develop? (I'll leave aside the lack of signature, as we all make such mistakes from time to time...) - jc37 18:19, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

How on earth could anyone abuse the ability to see a list of deleted contributions? I mean the sort of list that an admin could supply to an editor already? It's just a list of edits, it doesn't include the actual contents of the edits (or at least it didn't when I was provided with a copy of mine). And to be frank I think it is demeaning to have to beg a favour off an admin when I want to see what I have been doing. DuncanHill (talk) 18:22, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

(Note: I misunderstood your comments at first pass, and so removed my initial response)

Well, currently, the list is clickable, to allow for viewing deleted edits (for admins, anyway). And that was/is my concern. But if it is not clickable, then, as I mentioned above, I, at least, would probably support the ability to view an individual user's deleted edits being an option for non-admins. But I think it should be restricted to its own history page (as it currently is), though without the links to view the edits. As for "demeaning", I don't see such a request as "demeaning" by any means, but perhaps I'm missing something. Would you clarify? - jc37 18:38, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

It's demeaning because it reinforces the "non-admins can't be trusted" atmosphere. If I want to review my contributions I don't see why I should have to ask for permission from anyone, especially in the kind of example I gave above from my own experience. I am not sure what you mean by "its own history page". Do you mean only being able to see one's own deleted contributions list and not those of other editors? That would not help if one needed other editors to see it as evidence in the kind of example I gave, where the only way to prove that the admin in question had screwed up was for other editors to see what he had based his comments upon. DuncanHill (talk) 18:53, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

I think this is where I make a joke about how no Wikipedian can fully be trusted (we are human after all : )

But joking aside, I think the point of having content of deletions not viewable by everyone is more about admins having to go through a process ascertaining at least the appearance of community trust (WP:RFA), whereas an editor need only decide on a name and passowrd, and voila, they're a Wikipedian. So (supposedly), we should be able to trust admins to view the text; and while we presume good faith of everyone else, that trust isn't necessarily well-founded in every case, as we've learned repeatedly and daily.

As for the "separate page", what I was trying to say is that I wouldn't want a list of deleted edits to be merged with a page history, nor even viewed from any space but user space. I can see the use for vandal fighters to see an editor's deleted edits, and even the ability to click on the deleted article name in order to see the article log of why the article was deleted. (Though not the ability to click on the version link to see the actual edits. THat, I think, isn't a good idea.) And as well, I can see potential issues with a user being able to see even a list of their deleted edits. (I'm attempting to avoid listing, per WP:BEANS, obviously.) So I'm still at "weak support" stage of that. Does this more clearly clarify? - jc37 19:05, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for the clarification, that makes sense, and I think it being "user based" rather than "article based" makes sense. As for the issues with a user being able to see a list of their deleted edits, if someone says to me "I've got a good reason for this, but I'm not going to tell you what it is" - that has never worked on me and I doubt it ever shall. Maybe I've got a suspicious mind, or maybe I've been misled by people doing that once too often, or maybe it's because the best teacher I ever had taught me never to accept anything without evidence. DuncanHill (talk) 19:21, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

(smile) I agree with that stance myself. (Doesn't mean that I'm going to leave some beans laying around, but I do agree : ) - jc37 19:39, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

I have to agree, I do not see why anyone should have their own deleted kept from them. In some cases such as Duncan's, the information can be useful to exonerate. To take it one step further, I do not see why I should have to goto an admin to see the contents of those deletions as well. If they are still on the server where over 1,000 admins can see them, why can't I? Lets take some worst case scenarios, say I create an article attacking someone, the article is deleted, yet still available for thousands to see, admins that is, what purpose does it serve to have that content hidden from me? I already know what I wrote, I could just as easily save it, it does not save space nor traffic. For a lighter example, such as those given, say I write an article and go on vacation, the article is deleted while I am away. I can see why it was deleted, but not what happened after I created. If I do not have a copy of the contents, I further do not know what I wrote and how to improve it if it fails on notability, or lacking verifiable sources.

I do not think demeaning is the best way to explain how someone feels when they have to ask permission, its a way of creating a structure. For some items that structure is needed, and yes I know Wikipedia is not a democracy and we do not promote freedom of speech within the encyclopedia, however, if admins are equal to others, then they should not be able to see anymore then others. The idea that admins are equal is fully refuted as we give them more permission to do what no one else can do, this includes the ability to see my own work, work I can not see without asking permission. Consider if you were always allowed to speak, you just had to ask permission to do so first, would you not feel "under" that person?

Just one last point, I am not sure how we can assume the masses would do the absolute worse with access to their own content, however have a policy of assuming good faith. --I Write Stuff (talk) 19:30, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Well, comparing 851 to 48,230,193 (1,531 to 6,854,214, as of this posting) - I don't believe that I would agree for those reasons. - jc37 19:37, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

My point had nothing to do with the ratio of users to admins. To summarize, even in the worst example the content is still deleted, so it hurts no one to have the creating user be able to see it. In the best example it can help the quality of articles improve, as new users can go right to fixing. No reason has yet to be given on why an admin has to be asked for the information first. --I Write Stuff (talk) 20:40, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Ah, you see, you have failed to appreciate the power of the beans. "Beans" is the Wikipedia bureaucrat's equivalent of the government bureaucrat's "security implications". To quote from memory from Yes Minister:

• (Minister, arguing to BBC executive that an embarraassing interview not be broadcast): I also realise that I let slip some remarks which may have had security implications.
• (executive) Like what?
• (Sir Humphrey) Oh, well he can't tell you what they are. Security, you see.

Beans means that the arguer has thought up some far-fetched ways in which your idea might conceivably be abused by vandals, but obviously he can't say what they are, because there are hundreds of vandals closely following this very discussion just waiting for some new ideas about how to bring Wikipedia to its knees.

So rather like the deleted content which this discussion is about, the very reasons for its remaining known only to the priests must themselves remain known only to the priests.--Kotniski (talk) 19:25, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

I had a pretty annoying day, so this was just what I needed to cheer up. I can refute your argument but then I would have to kill you. --I Write Stuff (talk) 19:33, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

Deleted article - D-Space concept

I read the above thread and I am amazed that no one has challenged the false premise argument that preventing access to deleted content somehow prevents deleted articles from being resurected. What a bogus argument! If I am editing something and suspect (or know) my edits might be deleted then all I have to do is open up NotePad and a quick copy/paste of the raw text from the edit screen gives me the full ability to restore the article anytime I feel like starting an edit war!

On the other hand, I have had occassions where I have attempted to add value to an article, been away for a awhile (WP is a hobby, not an occupation or obsession for me), returned and found the article gone. It would have been nice to see what had changed while I was away as I might have been able to improve whatever was the cause for deletion.

Perhaps the solution is to create a new "D"eleted articles namespace called "D-Space:" which would parallel mainspace but with 3 special exceptions.

• (1) A new article cannot be started by a non-admin in D-Space, only edited.
• (2) Only signed-in/established users can enter D-Space. Invisible to IP users.
• (3) Any article in D-Space cannot be returned to Mainspace unless it gets approval as being ready for mainspace.

Related concepts include:

• A bot can scan the two spaces and watch new mainspace articles to flag any duplication of articles by name or by large chunks of text in corresponding D-Space.
• Articles "deleted" (other than "risk" or cruft articles) would actually be transfered to D-Space by an admin and would not be visible from mainspace except as contribution redlinks.
• Authors wishing to restore the article would need to request review for readiness.
• Articles in D-Space would not be subject to deletion. Individual edits might be subject to removal (vaporization I call it) for risk content.

Think of D-Space as like a WikiProject for deleted articles needing improvement. -- Low Sea (talk) 21:25, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

This has been suggested before, and dismissed. The thing is: deleted articles shouldn't show up in WP space (any of them) by default. Deleted articles are usually deleted for a good reason. By having a space specifically for deleted articles to live, they're effectively still being hosted by Wikipedia, which leads to many problems (some of them involving WP:OTRS). I think the proposal above, making it possible to view a deleted article through Contributions, is probably the best solution available. Still abusable, but not nearly as bad. (As with others above, I'm dancing around WP:BEANS here.) -- Kesh (talk) 02:34, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

You neglect the fact that most deleted articles are still hosted by Wikipedia, since administrators apparently have access to them. I understand that the most harmful ones are deleted by overseers so that even admins can't see them (I don't know how many more levels of bureaucracy this goes up). So what kind of content is it that admins should be allowed to see but bog-standard editors oughtn't? And does this category really constitute the bulk of deleted articles, to the extent that it needs to be the default? There are many good reasons for which articles might be deleted from an encyclopedia; only a few of them (e.g. defamatory or illegal material) would seem to give grounds for actually preventing community access to that content. --Kotniski (talk) 07:19, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

Okay, fine, I'll spill the WP:BEANS on this one. I've seen folks use articles that were deleted and then userfied to fool people off-wiki before. They link to the userfied article and claim it as a "referenced article on Wikipedia," knowing that most folks have no concept of how Wikipedia works. People just see a link to en.wikipedia.org, see the article, and think it's being maintained by a neutral group of individuals. By keeping this Deletion article space, it exacerbates the problem. Spam, self-promotion and original research should not be viewable to the general public once deleted from article space. It's not perfect and there are ways around it, but it shouldn't be made easy for folks to use Wikipedia to promote their original ideas/products. -- Kesh (talk) 15:25, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

I agree with Kesh, maintaining a visible space for deleted articles would create an incentive for POV forks, and vandalism since the content would still be visible (and linkable). (But I agree that accessing your own deleted contribs would be nice). -- lucasbfr ^talk 15:50, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

You really think that it's not already possible to get POV content linkably onto the Wikipedia site without it being noticed?? At least if it were done through deleted pages, we could put a big red notice at the top saying that this is not a Wikipedia article, this content has been deleted from Wikipedia etc. etc.--Kotniski (talk) 10:34, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

As a minimum, I can;t really see any reason not to permit registered users to access their own articles--it gives the ones not savvy enough to have saved copies, a easy way to try to improve them. I'd email the actual author almost anything, but why have them go through the loops? We need to encourage newbies to write articles to keep the project alive. Can this be handled by the permissions system in mediawiki? DGG (talk) 16:59, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

I would go further; I would say that anyone should be able to request deleted content from an admin, whether or not it was their own work. As long as a sensible reason was given, and there was no reason to suspect the requester of ill motives, the request ought to be granted without loops. --Kotniski (talk) 10:30, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

In fact, at the discussion over at Wikipedia talk:Deletion policy (which is rapidly developing into a new incarnation of this one), one administrator implies that this would indeed be the response of "many" administrators. Should this be codified, or should it just be left up to each individual admin to decide his/her own policy?--Kotniski (talk) 07:46, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

Kesh, I appreciate what you describe as a BEANS issue, but you missed my specific requirement that users who are not logged in at WP cannot enter or even see D-Space articles. Any attempt to do so should result in a login screen which could of course include a comment about the contents being very "unfinished" articles. The "general public" would not be vulnerable under these conditions. To go further, a distinctive URL could be incorporated to help avoid any attempt to "trick" people. -- Low Sea (talk) 01:25, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

Deletionpedia

I recently posted about Deletionpedia at the admin's notice board. Basically deletionpedia already collects for some time all articles deleted per AfD, Prod and many per CSD (A7 more or less). So the content of above mentioned article is actually available there[8]. Now I haven't gone yet through above lengthy conversation, but as I've argued in the AN thread, this should have an impact on how we look on deletions. There wasn't much response there under this angle, maybe due tot he fact that admins can see deleted content anyways. --Tikiwont (talk) 12:45, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for that info, great site:) It certainly provides a work-around for many of the practical problems being discussed. But I don't think that the (possibly impermanent) existence of such an outside site should affect WP's own policy on deleted content, either one way or the other.--Kotniski (talk) 14:55, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

It wasn't intended as normative 'should' but more in the line that it might influence peoples thoughts.--Tikiwont (talk) 15:38, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

An excellent use of our GFDL license, I am glad that the creators of this site have taken effort to preserve the editing history of the articles, and made sure that the user links lead back to the original user pages. _(1 == 2)^Until 15:41, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

As a spin-off from this, the issue has been raised at Wikipedia talk:Deletion policy of whether there should be an external link to Deletionpedia from that policy page. Please discuss there.--Kotniski (talk) 20:30, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

IAR

I think Ignore all rules needs to be amended to include a disclaimer that it should not be cited for admin actions. I've seen this being done a couple times recently, and it just seems totally ridiculous to me. IAR has always been a policy that applied to editing for the most part, in my eyes anyway. Any admin action that goes against policy should have a better explanation than per IAR. Lara❤Love 22:10, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

The meme of "citing" IAR follows from a misunderstanding; adding an "exception" that it can only be cited sometimes only reinforces that. But I would support adding some explanation to IAR in an attempt to reduce these misunderstandings. — Carl (CBM · talk) 22:19, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

Why would admin actions be any different, when the overriding goal is to improve the encyclopedia? IAR = Think freely; Respect others; Observe limits to behaviour. All actions can be reversed. If an admin acts on IAR and is wrong, other admins can step in with good justification and set things right. That shouldn't stifle creative thinking on the part of admins, no policy can set out every rule. Franamax (talk) 22:24, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

I can't think of a possible time when applying IAR to an administrative guideline betters the encyclopedia. I've seen it used 2x this month - one violating deletion policy and the other a violation of the blocking policy. Both admins cited IAR, but neither action was so necessary that the application of IAR made this a better place. The actions made it worse. Edits can be reversed, but actions, such as punitive blocking, leave lasting damage and send editors into an early retirement. the_undertow ^talk 22:46, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

This suggestion needs to start at WT:IAR. But I will say that if you have a problem with admin actions then take them up with the admins, but this does not indicate IAR is to blame. _(1 == 2)^Until 22:54, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

If you mean IAR to delete some "cabal" pages, I would incline towards deletion having been a net improvement, but I wear bathrobes only in private, so I'm not neutral ;)

And agreed that WT:IAR is where it should go, but beware there is an ontological swamp (or something like that) waiting to suck you in :) Franamax (talk) 23:06, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

Mass deleting cabal pages after the MFD was closed as Keep and the discussion on ANI was leaning more toward supporting that result was not a net improvement. It flamed the fire in the debate and set a horrible example for new admins.

And I wanted greater input on this than from just those watching the page. Lara❤Love 23:17, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

The main virtue of the principle is its simplicity. I don't believe loading it down with "disclaimers" would be helpful. Christopher Parham (talk) 22:57, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

Of all arguments against, "loading down" a one-sentence policy with a one-sentence disclaimer just didn't come to mind as a possibility. As for admin actions being reversible, you can't revert a block log. Admin actions are a much bigger deal than article edits, in most cases. If you find it necessary to ignore an administrative policy, most likely you're going to be questioned about it and have a need to explain in greater detail than IAR anyway. So to prevent admins, particularly newer ones, from thinking IAR will save them if they purposefully do something stupid, there should be a little FYI in there to prevent admins from administering punitive blocks that can't be reversed, or mass deleting pages against consensus to fuel flames in a heated debate. Lara❤Love 23:10, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

In my opinion, the issue is less the rule and more the application thereof. It is flat out insanity to invoke IAR unless you've considered every option and the issue is so pressing that there's no time to adapt a rule through our regular processes to meet the circumstance. In a couple of years here, I've seen IAR invoked correctly about twice and incorrectly dozens of times.

The rule is fine. Invoking it incorrectly should result in discussion. - Philippe 23:14, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

See WP:UIAR which is a noble and bogged down effort to provide some clarity. My thrust there was that the person who wishes to invoke IAR has an onus to demonstrate why that is an improvement, however my direction was unsuccessful. Also see Hu12's comment here which I declare to be prescient. Blocks and block logs of course are singular - IAR still should apply but the attendant consequences of wrong decisions should reflect directly on the invoking admin, not on the rule itself (per Phillippe). Franamax (talk) 23:23, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

Philippe, that doesn't address this specific concern though. Something needs to be done about the improper invocation of IAR, specifically for admins actions which are not always reversible. For those that are, it's much more of a hassle in many cases. Admin actions almost always affect other users directly, so you have to deal with the feelings of those editors, as well as the discussion that should take place before reversing another admins actions, etc. Enough time is spent complaining about stuff here, it would be easier to address the problem to prevent occurrences in the future. If that means taking focus away from admin actions and putting more as a general note that IAR is not a policy to be cited, then that would work as well. Lara❤Love 23:29, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

Perhaps a standard question at WP:RFA should be "What is your understanding of IAR?" and "How does it apply to admin actions?" so that the new admins could be better evaluated. Franamax (talk) 00:12, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

That's a fantastic idea. Lara❤Love 00:14, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

The proposal significantly increases the complexity of the policy not only by doubling its length (on a relative basis, that is a lot of instruction creep), but by opening the door to further "clarifications" that in fact obfuscate the main point. Christopher Parham (talk) 01:44, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

It is "Ignore all rules", not "Ignore all rules accept admin rules" or even "Ignore some rules". We are chosen for discretion and we need to be creative when new circumstances go beyond the established best practices just like anyone else. Rules are not set in stone they are there to describe, not prescribe, best practices. That goes for everyone. _(1 == 2)^Until 23:49, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

I concur, this is just WP:CREEPy. I have this strange sense that it'll be a slippery slope, and sometimes IAR should be used in regards to admin actions. As for the cabal thing, I've said it before. If anyone has a problem with that cabal deletion, take it up with me, take it to DRV, comment on the RfC, but complaining about it just wastes everyone's time. Otherwise, we should let it go. Keilana|^{Parlez ici} 00:04, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

No one was complaining, but conversing. And I don't think it will be taken to DRV because you selectively deleted 'cabals' that are not as likely as others to take action. the_undertow ^talk 00:09, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

(ec)I think we all realize that. I have always felt the intent of IAR was to encourage article building. The fact that it has spilled over into administrative action is probably not the intention. I believe the 'rules' mentioned are the rules we use to build the encyclopedia, not the policy we use to block users or delete pages. Again, I don't see when IAR can ever be applied to an admin action and have a positive result. the_undertow ^talk 00:07, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

No, it applies to all rules, not just article rules. That is why it is ignore all rules. Any time the rules prevent you from improving or maintaining Wikipedia you are allowed to ignore that rule. All rules. _(1 == 2)^Until 00:11, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

I'm well aware of that, although I do adore the constant reiteration of the wording. But I don't agree that IAR should apply to admin actions, which is why we are here at the Policy section of the Village pump where policy is discussed. IAR levels the playing for all those who are editing articles. But it has an unfair advantage for the small percentage of admins who can IAR using tools to which other editors have no access and no recourse. If IAR is all-inclusive then it applies to admins, crats, devs, and arbcom. I don't really think that was the intent. the_undertow ^talk 01:21, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

(ec) Yes, Until, but not everyone is on the same level. Citing IAR is stupid and inappropriate. If you're going to ignore an admin policy, by all means, ignore it and hope you're not being stupid. But don't guarantee stupidity by citing IAR. That's what I'm saying. In thinking that citing IAR is an acceptable practice that somehow justifies inappropriate actions, it only encourages such actions. It should be made clear that this isn't a policy to be cited. If you're going to ignore all rules, you should be giving your justification at that time, not when someone points out your stupid action and per IAR edit summary. If people don't have a justification for their action, and they don't have IAR to fall back on, perhaps those stupid actions won't be made. Lara❤Love 00:14, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

Stupid actions happen both within and without the rules and procedures. There are no limits on stupidity. IAR was never, and is never, a justification to do something dumb. It is an invocation to think and act beyond what someone else has decided is the correct thing to do, it is a pointer to progress. As you note Lara, it should always be justified beyond just an edit summary. IAR should be a well-considered act with a well-considered rationale, if you invoke it, be prepared to defend your action after the fact, at your own peril. Think freely, respect others, observe limits. Franamax (talk) 00:39, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

Well, perhaps if we added such wording as to note that it's ignore all rules, not ignore all people. This has been noted by both Until 1==2 and Equazcion. Lara❤Love 01:31, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

My view of this issue is that all admin actions should one way or another reflect consensus. If there's an explicit consensus to ignore rules in a particular instance, an admin should not be a martinet and enforce the rules anyway. If there's a rule which is plainly not producing a constructive result, an admin can ignore it in the anticipation that the community will see the wisdom in ignoring it. What you can't do, as an admin, is force an outcome according to your views. This is the case even in "no consensus" situations. Admins are neither arbiters nor free agents, though I've seen quite a few admins that don't seem to realize this.

It's well-known that IAR doesn't let you act however you like (and citing IAR whenever you want to go off the deep end is no protection from your actions). This applies to admins and regular users equally.--Father Goose (talk) 02:19, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

Lara, I am confused. Are you saying admins should be allowed to ignore rules when they need to, but they should not be able to cite the policy that allows them to do just that? Mentioning the policy one had in mind in no way makes a decision more or less stupid. _(1 == 2)^Until 04:54, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

I would like to chime in my with my 2 cents. I think anyone who takes the drastic step of ignoring all the rules in our system in Wikipedia, should be required when asked, why. Perhaps that is all that is needed. I do not think admins should be exempt in their ability to put IAR to use, however I think we should require that anyone invoking it should be required to state why when asked, even if asked by the person who they may have blocked, banned etc. There should be a level of accountability. Personally I see what the writer attempted to accomplish, however, I have never seen a group put such a policy to good use, the ability to ignore the rules as long as you feel it is for the better will just alienate those who got played by the rule and where IAR was used against them. --I Write Stuff (talk) 20:09, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

IAR is often invoked not as a substitute for a proper justification, but simply to flag that something doesn't fall within the letter of an existing policy, often accompanied by a justification for its use, right there in the edit summary. It is a fact that a huge number of articles are speedy deleted that do not fall within the letter of any CSD criterion (for example, blatant WP:NFT protologisms and the like). This is far more common than most users would think and the vast majority of these are proper and well done. Of course, because when properly done no one ever notices, many users' experience with these are only with the tiny subset that are improper and make their way to DRV or elsewhere, so a false impression is given and only the negative aspects are seen. Much use of IAR is in this vein: not throwing all rules out the window, but treating some of the rules malleably to account for others (i.e. bending the strictly worded CSD criteria to cover things blatantly in violation of WP:NOT).--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 03:30, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

Heh. My unofficial & unwritten amendment to IAR has always been, "But remember, someone will always ask you why you did." WP:IAR originally was a "don't worry, just contribute" rule; now it's an escape clause to avoid doing something stupid by following the rules. It's not & never has been a blank check to do whatever one will: for someone to state that "I banned everyone on the ArbCom due to WP:IAR" is not a good reason -- although it may be used as evidence that the Admin is either mentally ill or abusing illegal substances. -- llywrch (talk) 21:30, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

Admins need IAR. In fact, I rather feel wikipedia has become far too beaurocratic and IAR isn't cited enough, because the lag beween beaurocracy and positive result creates a festering hole for incivility, personal attacks, aggression and being good at rules even if you aren't good at the subject you're pushing a POV on. I rather feel the ever-more-complicated ruleset, and the increasingly monotonous and banal procedures that arrive from application of the rules to incidents that common sense would previously preside over is getting in the way of people building a better encyclopedia - particularly new editors. New editors come allong and make a few small changes to an article, only to offend someones sensibilities, and get WP:3RR thrown at them, which they quite possibly know nothing about, not understand the significance of, an don't particularly care about (after all, they came here to build an encyclopedia, not spend hours reading all the policy and guideline pages first - and there's a few of them.)

Anyway... that said, to offer a theoretical example I suspect may be more palatable to people (diplomacy is of course the foundation of politics, and there's always politics behind any democracy, assuming Wikipedia to indeed be democratic (well, more than not anyway)...

• An editor (A) has spent a lot of time creating an in depth and complicated article. For the most part, there's nothing wrong with it. This editor alone may have created and improved it to A or FA class. There is hwever one small mistake which an eagle eyed editor "B" spots and changes. Editor "A", being very protective changes this back twice in the ensuing editing tiff. Editor B however changes it a third time, and get's 3RR reported against her. Editor "A" then also changes it back a third time, which is a definite three revert rule violation. Editor "B" later does the same. Soon after, they both realise that Editor "B" was right, and that the behaviour was silly, and they kiss and make up. However, an administrator finds the resultant three revert rule reports and finds that both parties have breached the rule. Are we to follow the standard procedure and block them both for 12-24 hours for this, or are we going to say "IAR! They're both fantastic contributors, have imprved the encyclopedia and resolved their argument themselves. Rather tan block them and possibly also dissillusion them both in the process, I'll let them both continue to imprve wikipedia."?

3RR doesn't say that admins have to block offenders, so this wouldn't really be a case of IAR. (I still think 3RR is a bad idea though; and IAR a very good one.)--Kotniski (talk) 07:52, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

New ah articles

I have been on wikiepdia for a few weeks and mostly concentrate on law and music & entertainment related topics, in article-space and createing new articles. After a few relatively good experiences in created articles that sustained AFD with constructive commentary it gave me a rather brilliant idea to help the Wikipadia:

All new articles should automatically be put up for AFD as soon as they are created. We could have a bot to slap the subst templates on it as soon as the editor clicks the first edit creating the page. therefore it would be impossible to vandalise or hoaz the wiki, and, like my experiences, a early AFD on an inherently worthwhile topic, would result in the community getting involved to improve and discuss the article. It's great! JeanLatore (talk) 15:23, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

The problem with this idea, as I see it, is the enormous amount of energy that would be consumed by this process. We simply don't have the time to review every new article in this fashion. Darkspots (talk) 16:13, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

If every new article were listed at AfD, people wouldn't pay any more attention to AfD than they do to the new pages list. Equazcion •✗/C • 18:56, 13 Apr 2008 (UTC)

Yes! But I think the excitement this new systeme will generate will not only energize the community as a whole but also draw thousands of new users to the site!! This procedure would vastly emprove the articles, culling the chaff, and cultivating the cream/wheat... We coud weigh the merits of EVERY NEW ARTICLE from here on out!! Wow! JeanLatore (talk) 20:46, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

I advise you to take a look at Special:Newpages and see how fast new pages are created, also take a look at the process, they have to pass a sort of traditional initiation where most of the articles are speedy deleted. So your proposal makes no sense whatsoever, sorry that's how I feel, though I agree we need a bit better system to weed out the crap, the way to do this wouldn't be to make every article have a formal process, but rather to have less articles be created every minute, this is most likely not going to happen either though. The Dominator^Talk_Edits 04:22, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

A bit of statistics: There were 596,012 new articles added during 2007 that weren't deleted. We also know that about 1,000 articles per day were speedy deleted so adding 365,000 to that numbers we are talking about roughly 960,000 articles, which would translate under your proposal to about 2,600 articles per day, or about 2 new articles to discuss, edit, cull, etc. per minute. Does that put the impracticability of this into perspective?--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 23:26, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

WHAW. 596,012 in 2007 equals 1632 per day kept. And if 1,000 are speedy deleted and about 50 Afd ed. Then 2682 a day are created or which 39% are subsequently deleted. That's a lot of deletions. SunCreator (talk) 00:06, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

On a typical day, we have anywhere from 75-125 AfD discussions (see WP:AFD/OLD for a look at five days' worth), and not all of them get enough discussion to come to a consensus. Darkspots (talk) 23:48, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

• It's an interesting idea. But the number of Afd's are impractical as Fuhghettaboutit shows. I have another suggestion here. Already Your first article has been improved because it's such a major document for newbies and gets read an average 2,500 times a day. SunCreator (talk) 00:01, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Burden of evidence has been marked as a guideline

Wikipedia:Burden of evidence (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs) has recently been edited to mark it as a guideline. This is an automated notice of the change (more information). -- VeblenBot (talk) 18:51, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

it has been now changed to an essay; but nobody has started discussion there yet. DGG (talk) 22:36, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

Well, it sort of makes sense that it be an essay first, then a discussion then a guideline. Otherwise guidelines just spring up out of nowhere and without a bot to point them out we will not even notice them. _(1 == 2)^Until 22:43, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

Global blocking

A discussion on enabling global blocking on wikimedia is taking place on meta. — Werdna talk 01:13, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

If that constitues blocking all users at once, I'm all for it. :)

Seriously, though, this does not sound well. It invites abuse of power. Guido den Broeder (talk) 01:26, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

Sprotect all articles!

Unless somebody can explain to me why we tolerate IP edits at all? If a person can't figure out how to generate a username and a password, why would we want them to be editing here? What am I missing? Semi-protection obviously works to stop vandalism, or it wouldn't be used. What possible argument is there, that admits sprotection works in some heavily vandal-targetted places, BUT somehow would not work even better, if used automatically everyplace? If we did this, anybody anyplace could still edit. They'd just need a password and some personal responsibility. SBHarris 07:06, 2 April 2008 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Perennial proposals#Prohibit anonymous users from editing, Wikipedia:Editors should be logged in users, Wikipedia:Disabling edits by unregistered users and stricter registration requirement, and meta:Anonymous users should not be allowed to edit articles. This is not likely to happen. Algebraist 13:23, 2 April 2008 (UTC)

There are other proposals to address the problem of vandalism, which are not as restrictive regarding anonymous edits; see e.g. Wikipedia:Flagged revisions/Sighted versions. --B. Wolterding (talk) 13:36, 2 April 2008 (UTC)

Tonnes of our best content is written by someone who writes half an article by themselves, submits it from an IP address, and then never edits again. These are people who don't want to be regulars in the project, but are knowledgeable about one topic, so they help us out autonomously. There are other IPs that will make a minor fix now and then and don't want to be bothered making an account. We defiantly don't want to scare away this support by making them set up an account when they don't want to, even if it means putting up with more vandalism. --Arctic Gnome (talk • contribs) 21:00, 2 April 2008 (UTC)

Look, if I really believed you, then there's be no reason ever to sprotect any article, because we'd be protecting them from the addition of "tonnes of best content" just waiting to be contributed by all those IP editors out there.

Or do these editors only start articles, and never improve articles which are well on the way to featured status? How do you know? I'm trying to keep myself from slapping a tag on your statement. Got examples? Got examples where you can show that some IP user contributed massive amounts of work, but would have been too lazy to pick out a username and password, if they had been required to? I just do not believe it and I'm pretty sure you can't can't prove it, or even support it. If it ever happens, I do not believe it happens enough to be worth noticing.

Look, I'm a scientist. This is a question which is answerable by a simple experiment, since we all have strong opinons, but no data. We simply sprotect all the articles that start with "A" and then the compare the created content and vandalism as compared with a similar number of articles that start with "B", which we leave as is. Now, no doubt somebody's going to come hopping up and say that "We don't even have the monitoring tools to tell if this is working or not." Okay. Then that means YOU DON'T KNOW THE ANSWER, EITHER. But you think you do. You're writing a lot of policy and you're sprotecting some articles and not others, by the seat of your pants. Well, the seat of my pants says something else. The reason this suggestion is "perennial" is that I'm far from alone in that judgement.

Addendum: I went to the perennial proposals page above and looked at the cites, and found exactly what I expected: epidemiology. Epidemiology proves nothing. For example, we have a cite from somebody's blog (It's amazing what becomes WP:V when it supports the conclusions of the Foundation [9]) that most of the content (by number of letters) of the average article comes from users whose total contribution to the entire encyclopedia is relatively minor. Which is not supprising. And many of them are IP users. Again not surprising. But we don't know the key thing which is being assumed from this data, which is that if we required all these IP editors to register a username, they'd all go away and wouldn't do what they did. WE JUST DON'T KNOW THAT without doing the experiment. We do know that most vandalism is done by IP editors. Do we need to have an experiment to see what would happen if we made them all create usernames? The one class of people (good IP editors) wants to add content to a small area they know a lot about. They are presumably more motivated than the other type of person (bad IP editors) who wants no more than to erase a page and add an obsenity. Anyway, the bottom line is that this entire foundation policy is not really supported by any good data. The people who make it, just think it is. SBHarris 22:50, 2 April 2008 (UTC)

I can back up the statement that IPs do a lot of good work, /me digs around for the IP. there was one point where we actually tried make one Annon a admin. (10,000+ contribs on a static IP). β^{_{command 2}} 23:31, 2 April 2008 (UTC)

see Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/68.39.174.238 β^{_{command 2}} 23:38, 2 April 2008 (UTC)

Yes, but to be fair this guy is famous for refusing to take a username, and by now it's part of his identity not to. The average IP editor who was told they had to, would do it. Afterall, that's true of most blogs and websites on the web, so we know it happens. The idea that the average motivated contributer to Wikipedia is motivated very highly to contribute to the encyclopedia, but would balk have having to create a username if asked or required to, is perverse. And untennable. And, despite what some may think, actually has no data behind it. Because nobody's ever tried it, here. We don't even have any prospective epidemiology to see what happens to content addition to pages after they are sprotected. And we certainly have no data on what happens to them if they are randomly assigned to sprotection or not (or randomly assiged to be un-sprotected or not). What is what we need, to have an answer. SBHarris 00:03, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

Sure, IPs are not all vandals, but all vandals are IPs. I support semi-protection for all articles. Emmanuelm (talk) 01:22, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

Wrong; I know of quite a few vandal-only registered accounts, and I also know it takes a while to block them if they don't appear that often. -Jéské ^{(v^_^v Detarder)} 01:26, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

I've seen tons of registered vandals. They're just IP vandals in registered clothing, which really just makes them harder to spot.--Father Goose (talk) 02:18, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

In answer to Sbharris's question about why we semi-protect articles at all if IPs are so great: it is because in some cases the rule-of-thumb of helpful IPs does not apply. For a controversial article like George W. Bush, the amount of IP vandalism far outweighs the amount of useful IP edits. Likewise, for any featured article, there is little prose left to write, and few spelling changes to make. Most of the edits that need to be done are edits to make the article keep up with changing times and with changing Wikipedia policy, and we don't need IPs for those kind of tasks.

I agree that a scientific view of this would be best, and some people have tried. There is at least evidence for the idea that IPs are writing much of the content (unlike the Foundation's line that a small community is writing most). Somewhere I read a lengthy article in which the author looked through the histories of a large sample of random and featured articles to see who was adding most of the content. His conclusion was that while the vast majority of edits were done by registered users, much of this was either wikignoming or making the encyclopedia uniform in appearance. He wrote that much or most of the prose was from IPs or accounts with only a few edits. I'm sorry that can't remember who published this article, but hopefully another user will read this post and remember. In any case, when I looked through some random articles on my own, I found that his conclusion looked very plausible; there are many places where an IP wrote a paragraph and then never edited again.

You're right that we don't have hard data on how many people would avoid contributing if they had to make an account, but I'm not sure how we could get good data on that. If we were to semiprotect all of the articles that started with A, it almost goes without saying that vandalism would go down, but the key thing that we would have to see is whether useful contributions went down. Until we have a good way to test this, I think we may as well default to our "you can edit this now" policy, as it is one of the projects founding principles.

The other thing that we would have to test is how many new regular users we would loose by IPs not being able to edit. If I had not been able to experiment with some edits as an IP, I don't know if I ever would have found contribution appealing enough to bother making an account. If to make an edit I had to make an account and wait for it to be auto confirmed, I mightn't have bothered. --Arctic Gnome (talk • contribs) 01:29, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

Commenting generally on this: I would never have become a Wikipedia editor if I had had to register first. Having zero barriers to editing is a curse, as SBHarris points out, but also a blessing, as he fails to point out. And just as he points out that there's no data to support the "benefits" of allowing IPs to edit, there's no data to support the benefits of not allowing them to edit. Will we get less vandalism as a result? Probably, though it's not clear how much less. Will we get fewer good contributions (and contributors) as well? Also probably.

A certain amount of messiness is inherent in making Wikipedia "the encyclopedia that anyone can edit". The messiness is minimally damaging and easy to repair (although if you're a vandal-patroller, it is easy for one's view of this to get distorted). But the benefit of the openness is what made the encyclopedia. Barriers to entry are barriers to entry. We can and do ban serial vandals, after the fact. Toward everybody else, we want to offer no barriers to entry. Go ahead, click that button. [edit]. Right there. Welcome.--Father Goose (talk) 02:13, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

If you want to have a stable of articles for newbies who just cannot wait to edit to experiment with for a few days, that's fine. But I see no reason why we even want to make somebody who can't wait a certain time to edit, an editor at all. They probably have no frontal lobes. It is 6 year-olds who can't wait, not the kinds of people we want here. And finally, the point of the wait is that it works differentially against vandals vs. good-faith editors, which is why Jimbo's own bio is sprotected, even as he says there are reasons to want vandals to be IP-users (obviously he doesn't mean vandals of his own bio-- just the rest of the encyclopedia). The fact of the matter is that the barrier to good-faith entry is just ONE waiting period (however long we decide it should be), whereas the barrier to vandalism is one of these periods after another (a new one for each new account created after an old one is banned for vandalism). This gets old; vandals get tired. I have no doubt, though it will take a decent randomized prospective study to be sure, that vandals will get tired of multiple waits, sooner than good-faith users will get tired in ONE wait. See [10] for more discussion. SBHarris 02:42, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

Agreed. I doubt this place would have grown nearly as fast without the "no barriers to entry" motto. --Arctic Gnome (talk • contribs) 02:46, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

I think that it is also worth noting that Flagged Revisions has the potential to completely change the way that we use semi-protection and change the way that vandals interact with the site. If Flagged Revisions is a success, it might make almost all protection irrelevant. --Arctic Gnome (talk • contribs) 02:46, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

Woah! I'd missed the flagged revisions thing completely. A lot of ideas are in here which I've been pushing on my own for a long time, having arrived at them on my own. Looks like others are working on it, too. This is definitely the way to go. I've got to go there and see what I can add. Thanks for the direct! SBHarris 23:04, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

Sbharris, as a scientist, I imagine that you wish policies to be based on evidence. Here is the scientific evidence on anonymous editors:

• "The researchers were most surprised to find that the reliability of [anon ip's] contributions were at least as high as that of the more reputable registered users' contributions."[11]
• "Surprisingly, however, we find the highest quality from the vast numbers of anonymous "Good Samaritans" who contribute only once."[12] Unit56 (talk) 03:49, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for the link. The full text is worth a look, as the meat is in the graph at figure 1: [13]. Turns out that newbie IP editors start out contributing better content than logged-in (named) new users (as judged by simple time-retension of edits, it's about 75% vs. 66%). Then as user edit-count increases, the mean quality of contribs by IP-users goes DOWN, while it goes UP for nameusers, the two curves crossing at about 100 edits, then the trends continuing so that IP users with more than 100 edits are worse than nameusers with the same numbers!

How to explain this? I dunno. It's French and Dutch contributors being looked at, and it's possible that it's not the same in the US. It's also possible that we're merely seeing some kind of selection pressure on both nameusers and IP users over "time". I would expect that vandal-killing makes the surviving nameusers into a better group over time (vandal nameusers being eliminated), and this is seen. While a more lenient policy on blocking IPs allows vandals there to continue vandalizing, while the good IP users leave over time to become productive nameusers. Thus, overall quality for IP users tends to DROP with edit-count, as this group retains its vandals better, and its subgroup of committed good editors leave to register.

The article really doesn't look at any longitudinal patterns, tho, and it's always dangerous to infer them (If you do that with Florida, you infer from cross sections that the average person there learns Spanish in childhood, then later English, and then finally at the end of their lives, Yiddish..).

Now, how can use the data from this? It's hard to know. This study suggests that most new IP users generate as good content as new name users. I don't know how to fit that with my own perception, and that found by other papers, that most vandalism comes from IP accounts with few edits. It's a bit contradictory. By contrast, both this paper and my own experience suggests that IP users with a lot of edits are likely contributing poor quality, and need to be got rid of somehow, either by forcing them to register (the paper says this is actually a policy in the French and Dutch Wikipedias?) or else by stopping the coddling of IP vandal accounts (which now happens due to the possibility of them being shared educational institution IPs).

Lastly, there's the question of what would happen to the good-newbie IP users (what the paper calls Good Samaritans), if we require them to register. To what extent would they simply not participate and never register or contribute? We don't know. This paper doesn't help us find out. Perhaps, given the extremely low edit-counts this paper deals with (mean is about 10), the change in policy might be that newbie IP users are allowed 10 or 20 edits as an IP before they must register. That gets all those supposedly good edits, but at least kills the vandal IPs with the TALK pages that have 100 warnings. I think that would satisfy many objections here. It would also tend to discourage present coddling of vandal IP accounts, due to the knowledge that that users there are supposed to register eventually anyway. You can't both simultaneously hold that our best content comes from IP accounts with few edits, and also hold that we should continue to coddle sharred school IP accounts with many edits, most of which are vandal-edits. Nobody beleives we're talking about the same thing, there. Agree? SBHarris 23:39, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

It is a foundation issue that users be allowed to edit without logging in. This is one of the very few firm rules around here. I think the wisdom of that is debatable, but Wikipedia is very successful due in part to the fact that we all had the chance to edit Wikipedia without even logging in. For better or for worse that's the way all Wikimedia projects work and it isn't going to change. Mangojuice^talk 17:28, 4 April 2008 (UTC)

Want to kill the project? Easy, just stop people from editing. This proposal would do that. If people never start editing, they never become Wikipedians. – Luna Santin (talk) 20:14, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

Why would a company give out free samples? If we only consider the cost it's loony. Yet lots of people who get a free sample will end up buying the product. Editing without the hassle of registering is like a free sample. It may be a generation thing, but the myspace generation has apparently not yet grown up enough to contribute the majority of edits. Us older folks, for the most part, don't like to register at every site we visit. But we still have a couple of decades more accumulated nuggets of knowledge. As to why IPS edit at rather high quality. Here's a highly unreferenced theory. You come to a wiki page to find information. If what you find is well written you look at a page in your particular field of interest. Since you know quite a bit about that subject there's the "That's not quite right." and the "That's not even the half of it." effect. Somehow that nags. After a while you look at the edit page and write some text and copy out the "decorations" from another part. (Then someone's going to complain it's not referenced and you'll have to look into it or s.o. else fixes that.) Someone who registers on the other hand does that either because they like editing (and at some point the fountain of their knowledge runneth dry.) Or they are forced to because they want to create a page or do something else that requires registration. Anyway, keep the free samples coming or your "customers" won't buy. Lisa4edit —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.236.23.111 (talk) 11:40, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

I see this proposal being raised time and time again over the future years until one day, I think it will be enacted -- when Wikipedia stabilises and within striking distance of acceptability as an encyclopedia. JeanLatore (talk) 21:57, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

NUDE - No Undo on Dead Editors

Support, Oppose, Note, Comment? - Doug Youvan (talk) 07:28, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

• Huh? --Carnildo (talk) 07:42, 8 April 2008 (UTC)
• Kudos on the creative acronym, but I join Carnildo in the "huh?"
• Strongly oppose. Not even being dead does not guarantee a concrete edit, no matter what the circumstances. I can see this being abused quite heavily.--WaltCip (talk) 13:43, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

Assume "Editors" is plural: Is it currently feasible to see all of WP as it stood on a previous date with all hyperlinks in place? - Doug Youvan (talk) 14:24, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

It's feasible in the sense that someone who starts with a complete dump of the English Wikipedia (the last was in September 2007?) could write software that would let a person specify a date and time to "view" Wikipedia. But the wikilinks would have to work very differently - clicking on a link would require the software to check the history of the page being requested to determine which version to show.

And I'd guess that no one is going to bother - if someone really wants to know what a (few) articles looked like at a certain time and date, they can do that manually. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 15:49, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

Yes, don't try that with Microsoft WebExpressions' Import Wizard with the pages from home and hyperlinks set to xxx layers deep! A new domain, frozen once a month, en.wikinude.org , might make a good fund-raising project for WP in general. - Doug Youvan (talk) 17:32, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

Hope you're all older than 18 and no one's logging in from the office. There are very few places that aren't your home and wouldn't block that. Remember back when "Starhustler" was changed to "Stargazer" because it kept getting blocked?? Lisa4edit —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.236.23.111 (talk) 12:07, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

The data is there; it's just a job of mining. So, even if this doesn't happen for ten years or more, nothing is lost. That gives us plenty of time to think of a better URL. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Nukeh (talk • contribs) 17:54, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

• Support editing Wikipedia nude... wait, that is what this is about right? _(1 == 2)^Until 18:00, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

• Oppose, unless it can be made quite clear what the proposal actually is. User:Pedant (talk) 18:06, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

• Oppose unless provisions can be added permitting the beating of dead horses, which I much prefer over dead editors. *Dan T.* (talk) 18:40, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

• Comment – I suppose Dead editors includes murdered editors as well? Then I know just the way to make this proposal stick. (takes out revolver and aims it at Doug Youvan) Waltham, The Duke of 00:16, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

Works of fiction

I'm a relative n00b to this place, I've only been editing for two months, and I seem to be confused about something. Policy states that plot summaries of films do not normally need to be cited (unless you are providing an original interpretation of the plot), and that information about video games can be cited from the manual or the game itself. I take this to mean that all works of fiction such as tv, movies, novels, and games, may serve as primary sources for basic information about the works such as plot elements, game mechanics, and so on. Yet time and time again, I see editors screaming "OR! OR! OR!" whenever they see unsourced information about works of fiction in articles. Time and again, I see articles nominated for deletion becuase they contain unsourced lists of trivia taken from works of fiction because the nominator considers it original research. My question is, when writing about works of fiction, when is it necessary to cite the primary source? Almost every film article I've seen has plot summaries with absolutely no citations, yet trivial articles about video games and television seem to be held to a higher standard simply because they are viewed as cruft. Can someone explain to me why "In episode 42 John trips over a rock" is decried as OR while "In Halloween Horror IV Jason stabs a girl in the neck" is perfectly OK? I know I'm treading into the waters of "inclusionism vs. deletionism" but I'm sick of reading the hypocrisy taking place on AfD discussions. TRIVIA is not the same thing as OR. --ErgoSum88 (talk) 05:56, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

"Wikilawering" is the short answer. When you want to have something deleted, you have to find a rule that plausibly backs up your dislike of the article. WP:N, WP:NPOV, WP:NOR, WP:DIRECTORY, WP:IINFO are all questionably applied in service of this goal. I've even seen the five pillars wikilawyered for this purpose.

AfD can be abused for some very unencyclopedic purposes sometimes.--Father Goose (talk) 11:27, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

Reading WP:NOR gives the information that primary sources (such as books, TV shows, etc) can be used as long as you don't draw analytical etc conclusions. Bland statements of fact without attributing motive, making comparison, etc, are not OR when drawn from a primary source. Doing anything more requires a secondary source. SamBC(talk) 10:40, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

Dummies in Wikipedia

I am new to Wikipedia as an editor and want some assistance in understanding how it works. I have been browsing through Wikipedia for a long time and have been observing that Wikipedia editors use dummy names or pseudonyms in order to hide their identitities. Now it is theoretically possible for one person to register with several dummy names. Similarly, a group of ideolgues bent upon spreading a particluar ideology can joun together, hiding their identities and act in unison to create a false impression. Now I have some questions- (i) Are multiple dummies by the same person allowed? (ii) Does Wikipedia record the PC ID number of editors who chek in as registered users as they do for anonymous editors? (iii) Does Wikipedia make any effort to identify dummy editors? Please enlighten me on these points. - Shyamal Gupta (talk) 13:05, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

no, only where there is evidence that multiple accounts are being used. --Fredrick Dayton (talk) 13:06, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

The point is not clear. Please expalin a liitle more in details. - Shyamal Gupta (talk) 13:08, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

Please read Wikipedia:Sock puppetry and also WP:MEAT. Sockpuppetry is expressly forbidden and will end up with the user being indefinitely blocked. Every time a user logs on, their IP address is recorded in the logs. Only Wikipedia:Checkusers can access this information and only then within the foundations privacy policy. Woody (talk) 13:12, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

Correction: abusive sockpuppetry is forbidden. Having multiple accounts is allowed, but using them to create a false impression isn't. Things that you aren't allowed to use socks for include (a) posting multiple comments to a discussion, especially to create a false sense of consensus, (b) having a "good hand" and a "bad hand" account, so that you can "let off some steam" with one and work towards adminship with the other, (c) get around things like the 3 revert rule by reverting twice with sock A and twice with sock B. Confusing Manifestation(Say hi!) 06:43, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for the explanations and links. - Shyamal Gupta (talk) 06:55, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

Is signing required?

One user has suggested that signing (four tilde business) is totally voluntary. Surely this isn't true? —TreasuryTag—t—c 14:30, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

I don't think it is required, though it is needed for proper communications. If the user made a habit of not signing then they would likely get escalating complaints. Never really seen what happens when someone takes it to far. _(1 == 2)^Until 14:35, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

One really wouldn't gain much from not signing; people can still tell who said what if they trawl through the history. Bots will also sign for you in many places. SamBC(talk) 14:43, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

Previous editor left out the fact that I do normally sign my posts and this was about second or third time I haven't and the very important fact that on on this occasion I did use 3 tidles and pointed out already to him I had made a mistake .Garda40 (talk) 14:50, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

That's nothing to do with it! You said that it is voluntary to sign posts. I said it wasn't... what more information is required? Anyway, did you know that under British law, it's legal to go up to someone in the street and say, "Would you like a slice of pizza?", and when they say yes, reply, "So would I!" but it's simply courteous not to do it... it's the same with signing. It's voluntary, but it's not voluntary. —TreasuryTag—t—c 14:52, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

The very fact that it is possible to leave comments without even being logged in (or even having an account for that matter) makes it quite clear that signatures are not required, only requested as a courtesy for clarity of discussion. When many people are talking it is nice to be clear who said what so you can "connect the dots". -- Low Sea (talk) 14:58, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

After edit conflict

There is no such thing as voluntary but not voluntary .It may be rude not to sign ,you may keep saying to the user "sign your posts" but in the end it is not a rule ,guideline or whatever of wikipedia to sign it is simply being courteous to other editors .Garda40 (talk) 15:05, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

"There is no such thing as voluntary but not voluntary"... yes there is, and if you don't understand it, I've not got the energy to explain it to you. —TreasuryTag—t—c 15:06, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

I think we can all agree that a signature helps people tell whose comment is whose and that not leaving a signature confounds this distinction. WP:SIG says it "is good etiquette and facilitates discussion by helping other users to identify the author of a particular comment", and that when someone does not sign that it is "a good idea to notify users, especially new users, that they should sign their comments". So take what you will from that, I would say the you should sign, but that we don't have a policy requiring it. _(1 == 2)^Until 15:22, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

People usually take the hint after getting {{unsigned}} appended to their comments a few times, anyway. – Luna Santin (talk) 20:37, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

I've actually run into a few users who refuse to sign their comments, as a WP:POINT to try and force their idea that comments should automatically be signed by the Wikipedia software. Anyway, no, signing is not required but it's frustrating to other users who want to follow the conversation. IMO, not signing your comments goes against the spirit of improving the encyclopedia that Wikipedia was founded on. Collaboration is key to making this work, and making it more difficult for others to follow discussions/debates is disruptive. -- Kesh (talk) 15:57, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

Not signing one's post also creates the impression that one is not assuming responsibility for what one has said, or that one is not fully supporting one's own words. This is not constructive in a discussion. Waltham, The Duke of 04:15, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

It can also cause confusion, if for some reason an unsigned comment appears above a signed comment and both have the same level of indentation, then it will look like both were written by the same person (this has happened to me, where someone inserted a comment above mine and didn't sign it). Confusing Manifestation(Say hi!) 05:24, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

To play devil's advocate... not signing could be beneficial if it helps people forget that they are arguing with other people and instead helps them focus on the content of the discussion. (You can imagine it for the brief period it takes the robots to catch this comment.) (Note to Admin: WP:POINT shouldn't apply here because I am not disrupting... I fully expect my comment to get signed.)

Copyright questions

If a source is used but not mentioned, does that constitute a copyright (or related) violation if there is no exact citation but:

1. the article contains a news fact (taken from the source);
2. the article contains a news report (reworded, but taken from the source);
3. the article contains a theory (reworded, but taken from the source);
4. the article contains a research result (reworded, but taken from the source)?

Thanks, Guido den Broeder (talk) 00:41, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

The case is that Guido is trying to promote his own (unknown) books to articles. After that he calls eventual removal copyright violation and abuses every procedure he can find, to get his books mentioned in the articles, see here. In this case he didn't even add text to the article, he just added his books. At NL.wiki the arbcom took severe measures against him for this behaviour. We also determined the unimportance of his books. Now he discovered EN.wiki and continued his behaviour here. GijsvdL (talk) 06:28, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

Hence the questions. Guido den Broeder (talk) 07:54, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

Copyright violations could only conceivably occur in the first of the four situations you describe above. Copyright law protects the expression of ideas, not the ideas themselves. Hence, if it's reworded, it's usually not a copyright violation. - Mark 08:09, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

Thanks, that already helps some. I'm not talking about ideas though. I know that ideas aren't protected, two people can get the same idea. I'm asking about failure to mention a source. Guido den Broeder (talk) 08:13, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

Citing sources has little to do with copyright (except for moral rights). Perhaps you are thinking of plagiarism, which is an entirely different thing. - Mark 08:29, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

No, I'm taking about the moral rights, which are quite a big issue in The Netherlands. Guido den Broeder (talk) 08:32, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

I don't know much about European laws relating to moral rights. Sorry. In any event, European copyright laws are irrelevant here. The Berne Convention means that if you were to bring legal action against Wikipedia, it would be under US copyright law, regardless of where the copyright work was published (assuming it's a Berne country), due to the concept of national treatment. - Mark 08:41, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

That's why I'm asking, I'd like to know what counts under US law regarding sources, whether listed under copyright or otherwise. Regards, Guido den Broeder (talk) 08:50, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

Anyways at en.wikipedia the approach would be more or less along these lines:

Guido is "founder and owner" of Magnana Mu Publishing & Research, the publisher of his Chess books [14] [15] - at en.wikipedia this is "self-publication";

Most relevant policy at en.wikipedia would be WP:V, notably WP:V#Self-published sources (online and paper), aka WP:SPS.

Which can be summarized along these lines, for the case at hand: if Guido is the only source on Amber tournaments 2, 3, 4 and 5: then this is below "notability" radar at en.wikipedia. If there are other sources (i.e. WP:RS sources), use these other sources for the content you want to see included in en.wikipedia. In that case, and if there is consensus, Guido's self-published sources maybe could be mentioned as "additional resources" or something along these lines in the tournament article. Note the "if there is consensus", I don't see that sort of consensus emerging yet (apart from the current lack of other RSes).

Yeah, indeed, the "copyright" approach would probably be a "red herring" here at en.wikipedia. --Francis Schonken (talk) 09:03, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

With regard to the books mentioned, the need for other sources does not apply, since these are the official publications on behalf of the organization. (Before the books, there were round bulletins (also in part by me), but these only exist during the tournament.) So if the tournament itself is notable (which it is: it has an article), then so are the books. That said, this is not the place to discuss the books, I've already put the question on [Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard], patiently waiting for someone to show up. Guido den Broeder (talk) 09:15, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

Nope, notability is not inherited. If I write a book about the Eiffel tower, it does not get a Wikipedia page (well, not unless my book's kickass excellency has led to it being widely recognized by other reliable sources). As to the core question: Using an unacknowledged source is bad style and my be plagiarism. Unless substantial concepts (not facts - facts have no copyright protection) are lifted from the source, its not copyright violation, though. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 09:40, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

If the owners of the Eiffel tower had asked you to write the official book about it, containing lots of information unavailable elsewhere, like its exact measurements, would it not be referenced in the Wikipedia article?

News facts are protected under Dutch law, with a special paragraph, that says that the source must be mentioned. Is that not the case under US law? (Also, under Wikipedia rules, how else are you going to verify the facts?) Regards, Guido den Broeder (talk) 09:51, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

That is not a question of copyright. I understand your desire to have your books included, but please do not mix up the different arguments. No, "official" status is not automatically sufficient to include a source - in fact, often this may be a reason to not include the source. See WP:SPS. Often sources published by an entity or with the official blessing represent a particular point of view, not WP:NPOV. WP:V requires verifiability via reliable sources. If your book is the only such, then its doubtful that the event is notable (we usually require multiple independent reliable sources). Moreover, are you certain that your book is the only source for these facts? There is e.g. the website of the event, and I find about 250 hits on Google News and nearly 40000 on Google. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 11:51, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

I don't know what a "News fact" is. But under US copyright doctrine, what is protected is the creative expression, not the facts expressed. See Feist Publications v. Rural Telephone Service for the important supreme court case establishing this. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 11:42, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

Ah. I found the proper term. It's called Attribution (copyright). The article is quite clear, and seems to indicate that it is in fact part of US law. Guido den Broeder (talk) 10:54, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

Yes, but it does not help your case. Attribution can make otherwise infringing use legal (e.g. for quotations, critical discussion, or parody). But reuse of facts is not infringing to begin with. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 11:42, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for confirming that it is part of US law. I am not asking about 'my case' here, however. Guido den Broeder (talk) 12:36, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

Note that Guido vandalized my comment above, I just restored it. GijsvdL (talk) 08:23, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WTF? OMG! TMD TLA. ARG! has been marked as a guideline

Wikipedia:WTF? OMG! TMD TLA. ARG! (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs) has recently been edited to mark it as a guideline. This is an automated notice of the change (more information). -- VeblenBot (talk) 18:51, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

Just noting that it is no longer a guideline. Captain panda 23:28, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

WikiNovel

• Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/User:TimAlderson/2019

Am I missing something here? - jc37 02:38, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

An explanation why you posted to the VP about this? -- Kesh (talk) 02:58, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

Free publicity, what else?... Waltham, The Duke of 04:46, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

Are users not supposed to write about companies where they work?

Does this violate WP:COI?--Urban Rose 00:42, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

It's only a problem if they can't write about it neutrally. EVula // talk // ☯ // 00:43, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

The problem is, most folks can't. It's extremely difficult to write a neutral article about your workplace. However, it's possible to come close. Basically, it's suggested that you write an article in your user space (something like User:Urban Rose/Myworkplacename ) and then ask folks on the Help desk to look over it. If no one objects, then moving it to the proper article name would be fine. Just leave a note on the new article's Talk page (after it's moved) to explain your COI, and your willingness to work with other editors to make the article neutral and factual. -- Kesh (talk) 02:42, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

Nah, just write in the main namespace, and maybe' put a disclaimer on the talk page like "I might not be entirely neutral here... just FYI, please NPOVize".

Rule 1 of the wiki is: Use the fine wiki. :-)

--Kim Bruning (talk) 11:05, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

I have another idea: work in pairs. The collaboration between a person who loves working in a company and a person who hates being there should produce a relatively neutral result. Waltham, The Duke of 03:25, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

The collaboration between a person who loves working at a company and a person who hates being there will produce more drama and flamewars than you can shake a stick at, culminating in an ArbCom case or three. --Carnildo (talk) 04:37, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

Not if they are friends. I was thinking of two colleagues, working in the same office.

...Yes, it can happen. Waltham, The Duke of 18:01, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

Looking for others to reduce unnecessary conflict and drama at source

• I'm looking for others that are interested in improving wikipedia policy, guidelines and other documents to increase harmony among editors and reduce or remove unnecessary conflict.
• It occurred to me there might already be such a team or wikiproject already.
• If your interested please let me know, if there is already something like this, let me know that also. :) SunCreator (talk) 14:42, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

You may have a look at Wikipedia:Mediation, at least for an effort to defuse conflicts. Arnoutf (talk) 16:45, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

Looking to remove drama at source, not get involved in any conflict that happen. SunCreator (talk) 17:12, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

Didn't look through your contribs so I don't know if you posted there already but to propose a WikiProject go to WP:WikiProject Council/Proposals. The Dominator^Talk_Edits 17:02, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

Okay, will check that out. SunCreator (talk) 17:12, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Harmonious editing club? Doesn't seem very active, though.--Father Goose (talk) 05:50, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

Selfreferencing questions

1. If a selfreference has been deleted by another user, and then reinserted by a third, is it still a selfreference? Does WP:COI still apply and if so, in what way? What if the reference is again removed by a fourth user? And then reinserted by the original selfreferencer?
2. I've had it confirmed several times that there is no difference to Wikipedia between a reference and a selfreference when it comes to relevancy etc. However, some users keep insisting that selfreferences are by definition less relevant, or even by definition self-promotion (see my talk page). Has there been a change in policy since I went on Wiki-break?

Thanks, Guido den Broeder (talk) 00:15, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

By "selfreference" do you mean things published first-person (ie. by the subject)? If so, they are less reliable than independent sources, which does make them less relevant to the article. However, they are not totally disallowed. The rule is: any controversial facts must be backed up by independent, third-party sources. First-party sources can be used for non-controversial facts, but are not considered reliable if at all questionable.

As an example, I had cited Stephen King's own book On Writing as a source for the (oft stated) fact that his first novel, Carrie, was fished out of the trash by his wife. That fact had made its rounds in various magazines and books, but always as "it is said that…". In this case, the author himself confirmed it as a fact.

We have to be careful with doing that, as often primary sources are used for simple self-promotion. A statement by John Doe that he killed a dozen ninjas when he was 5 should be considered dubious, and only included in the article if it can be verified (or at least is referenced as legend) in the subject's article. -- Kesh (talk) 16:08, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

Thanks, Kesh. What about my questions under (1)? Regards, Guido den Broeder (talk) 11:19, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

How does an essay become elevated to a guideline ?

This is a procedural/how-to question related to establishing policy ... I have found a WP essay written by another I feel has great potential to make an excellent guideline (or even policy) and I would like to know the correct process for doing that. I am certain there is a need for consensus building but where does that discussion take place and how are people made aware of the discussion at all? -- Low Sea (talk) 06:35, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

Simply start a discussion on that essay's Talk page. Usually a brief notice here on the VP that you're starting the discussion, with a link to the Talk page, will be enough to get some people talking about it to reach a consensus. -- Kesh (talk) 21:24, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia:How to create policy is a helpful read. Cheers! Vassyana (talk) 03:38, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

How can you give Nazi's a page?

I am offended by them having a page, this is not due to personal disagreements but rather due to the fact that many of my ancestors were killed by them. This is an honest question please answer. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.158.87.216 (talk • contribs)

• Encyclopedias contain articles on bad people. Encyclopedia articles do not exist in order to promote, or demote, someone's standing in history. They exist to provide information on historical figures, good or bad, honorable or evil. If you look into any general-purpose encyclopedia, you will find an article on Adolf Hitler, because there is no denying his impact on world history, even though his actions, ideas, and policies are and were thoroughly despicable. Trying to remove information about such people is like trying to rewrite history, pretending it didn't happen, and that does not in any way further Wikipedia's aim to be a source of information. Nor does it further the cause against anti-semitism, nazism, and tyranny. Sjakkalle (Check!) 09:54, 16 April 2008 (UTC)
• Wikipedia is not censored, and it would be a very poor encyclopedia that would omit a major period of history. Resolute 15:55, 16 April 2008 (UTC)
• Perhaps the best argument: George Santayana said "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." --David Shankbone 16:06, 16 April 2008 (UTC)
• Also, incidentally related, information I brought home from the US Holocaust Museum says very clearly: talk about what you've seen. One of the best ways to talk about it is to document it. Having a page here isn't intended to be an honor, but a record. Some records are good, some are bad, and some are - let's face it - both bad and good (that's obviously not the case here, but I can think of certain pop stars...) - Philippe 16:24, 16 April 2008 (UTC)
• Frankly removing anything in the encyclopedia that anyone is "offended" by... doesn't really make much of an encyclopedia. Humanity, for instance, would be the first article to be deleted.--WaltCip (talk) 16:44, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

• I wonder if the reader is asking about an encyclopedia article (which will be kept) or a user page (which will probably be BALEETED and the user blocked). It's probably the former, but there's a small chance it's the latter. Dan Beale-Cocks 16:50, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

• To be honest, I'm not convinced this is a good-faith request. See this edit just four minutes before this section was started and also see the account's previous edits. Black Falcon ^(Talk) 17:11, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

• It makes sense; only an Evil Army could stand against the mighty Nazis. :-D Waltham, The Duke of 05:28, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

• I agree with all the points raised above. If one should be stricken off Wikipedia, that would probably be Herostratus. But we are not bound by 2,000-year-old legal rulings here, are we? (evil grin) Waltham, The Duke of 17:25, 16 April 2008 (UTC)
• I imagine you are opposed to the practice of Holocaust denial; in order for us to document what the Holocaust was, we need to document, among other things, who the Nazis were and what they did.--Father Goose (talk) 04:37, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

Copyright laws for text

I recently made a series of edits in the Second Chechen War article. my edits. A user ended up reverting all of my edits because he said I was breaking copyright laws. I'm almost positive that I have not. I copy/pasted a couple very small sentences/half sentences that present statistical facts, and the one large paragraph I added wasn't a copy paste at all, but a collection of factual information completely reworded from the referenced article. You can see the user "warned" me on my talk page after I reinserted and re-re-worded the larger paragraph. Is he wrong or should I start getting ready for a 6-12 month vacation? LokiiT (talk) 17:58, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

The other user should not have reverted all of your edits, just the ones (s)he deemed problematic. However, (s)he was right that at least one sentence, "Russian Interior Ministry statistics showed that up to 1,300 people had been kidnapped in Chechnya between 1996 and 1999" is directly taken from the source that you listed. This is plagiarism (you can't take someone else words in whole or part unless that work is in the public domain). You can either find a way to reword the paragraph and paraphrase the information or quote it. Karanacs (talk) 18:05, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

I went back and looked at your talk page conversation about this, and I think I see where you got confused. It looks like you were referring to the guideline's phrase: " limited use of copyrighted material can be done without requiring permission from the rights holders for such things as scholarship and review". Yes, you can use copyrighted text, BUT it must be quoted and sourced so that there is never any question whose work it is. Without the caveat in the guideline, we'd never be allowed to quote from anything. I hope this helps! Karanacs (talk) 18:08, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

Okay. Well, I did source it so anyone can click the citation and view the original, are you saying I need to quote it as well? Will this suffice instead? LokiiT (talk) 18:14, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

If the article uses someone else's actual words, and not just the idea, then you do have to use quotation marks. Your reword is better, but I'd paraphrase it a little more, maybe along the lines of "Betwen 19916 and 1998, approximately 1,300 people were kidnapped in Chechnya, according to figures provided by the Russian Interior Ministry." Karanacs (talk) 18:54, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

Two People/Same Name

I was going over the history of Guns N Roses and then wiki'd over to Hollywood Rose and was curious to see how that was covered. I saw my friend Jimmy Swan had been included in the article as he should and when I clicked the link I got a totally different person. Same name, but different person.

Fast forward to today and he has posted a message asking how to get that flaw fixed. I told him I would look into it.

How is the istance of two people with same name handled?

Thank you very much.

--Qwiksilver (talk) 20:15, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

Hi Qwiksilver, two people with the same name, if they both have articles here (or merit articles), are usually solved with a disambiguation page. Are there two Jimmy Swan articles? Keeper | 76 | Disclaimer 20:17, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

So far there is only one Jimmy Swan. I need to look at the disabiguation page to see how I can use it to redirect to the correct one after I get the correct one written. Thank you for jogging my memory about disambiguation.

--Qwiksilver (talk) 22:38, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

spam protection filter: too zealously?

Hello,

I tried to save a new version of Beagle conflict and got following message:

... The following link has triggered our spam protection filter: http://www. la nacion . com

Either that exact link, or a portion of it (typically the root domain name) is currently blacklisted. ...

La Nación is really fundamental as source for many articles over Argentina and I can't believe that "La Nacion" is sending spam.

Can any Admin checks the reason?

Bye, --Keysanger (talk) 07:56, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

Report this at Wikipedia talk:Spam blacklist. George D. Watson (Dendodge).Talk^Help 08:20, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

It's actually blocked at meta:Spam blacklist probably under nacion dot com - I'll go and see if we can get the rule reconfigured. x42bn6 Talk Mess 11:45, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

Listed, obviously can't link it here as it is blacklisted and the url is the section link, but see [16]. x42bn6 Talk Mess 11:50, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

Fixed on Meta - apologies for the inconvenience --Herby ^{talk thyme} 11:52, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Overcategorization/User categories has been marked as a guideline

Wikipedia:Overcategorization/User categories (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs) has recently been edited to mark it as a guideline. This is an automated notice of the change (more information). -- VeblenBot (talk) 18:51, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

Move-protect policy pages?

Per this round of vandalism page moves, which apparently weren't such simple things to fix, perhaps move-protecting policy pages would be a good idea, unless we can come up with a better method of reverting moves. Equazcion •✗/C • 19:57, 17 Apr 2008 (UTC)

Personally, I think we should move-protect nearly all pages or at least all FAs and policy pages, if a move was badly needed an admin could move them, legitimate moves don't happen that often do they? The Dominator^Talk_Edits 22:02, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

Well, when you legitimately do need to do a page move, having to go through the bureaucracy of an admin request is as bothersome as having to do {{editprotected}} requests. Move-protecting policy pages seems prudent to me -- but not guideline pages unless there's a demonstrable problem. FAs? Mayyyyybe. You should probably do a requested move on an FA anyhow.--Father Goose (talk) 06:39, 18 April 2008 (UTC)

American

Input would be appreciated at Wikipedia_talk:Manual_of_Style#American. Question regarding use of "American" to describe persons from the United States. – Luna Santin (talk) 22:44, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

Be cruel

I'd like to put a new guideline up for discussion: Be cruel. It is actually not new, but a translation of the German guideline/help page de:Wikipedia:Sei grausam, which seems to be accepted on the same level as AGF and the likes. The dutch and slovak wikipedias have also adopted this useful concept. --Dschwen 22:12, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

I made a few minor copyedits. I think this has the potential to be a useful companion to things like WP:AGF and WP:NOSPADE, though you may have an uphill battle here. MastCell ^Talk 22:43, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

Right now there seems to be neither hill nor battle, just mostly indifference. Thanks for the numerous copyedits though (by you and other users)! --Dschwen 18:25, 18 April 2008 (UTC)

Policy on redirects?

A little while back I wrote an article on AABB, formerly the American Association of Blood Banks (now international and dealing with more than just blood, the acronym no longer stands for anything). The page was originally a redirect to a computer graphics term. Given the users on wikipedia, I'm guessing that the original article was more likely to be noteworthy to most readers, but is there anything written on what "leads" in disambiguation? A full disambiguation page seems excessive for two articles.Somedumbyankee (talk) 17:45, 18 April 2008 (UTC)

The current set-up—AABB as an article about the organization, with a hatnote to the computer graphics term—seems fine. AABB is the official name of the organization, whereas AABB (axis-aligned bounding box) is just a subtopic of bounding volume. The only thing to check is that there are no links to AABB referring to the box, and it appears that there aren't. Gracenotes^T § 21:13, 18 April 2008 (UTC)

Not quite sure how (or if) to correct it, but the German wikipedia "AABB" is for the graphics term, so users switching between languages will see two very different articles.Somedumbyankee (talk) 21:29, 18 April 2008 (UTC)

That just means you need to set up the interwiki links properly. --Carnildo (talk) 22:48, 18 April 2008 (UTC)

Template:PD

• Discussion moved from WP:AN#Template:PD per suggestion.

For those interested in copyright issues, I have proposed a change to {{PD}}, a deprecated tempate, in which new images uploaded with this license tag after 1 May 2008 would be eligible for speedy deletion in accordance with {{nld}}. I think this is necessary because the template has been deprecated for over two years and we still get new images with this license tag. This may be controversial due the fact of this template's usage on hundreds, if not thousands, of images, and I definitely welcome any comments on this approach, which is similar to the one which was used for {{Military Insignia}}. Any comments or feedback are welcome. If this announcement was more appropriate to another forum, please feel free to move it there and let me know. Kelly ^hi! 01:24, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

Where did you make this proposal? Ed Fitzgerald (unfutz) ^{(talk / cont)} 02:07, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

Template talk:PD#Edit request. Kelly ^hi! 03:00, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

I would be slow to implement this. For one thing, people might delete images older than it by mistake. Perhaps we could batch migrate {{PD}} images to {{PD-deprecated}} (or some other template to be created) and then make new {{PD}} images subject to deletion. Stifle (talk) 08:50, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

Have you tried the approach of getting a group of people together to clean-up the images with old PD tags instead of using the deletion process to clear the backlog? A good start would be doing the work needed to find out how many of these images there are. Category:PD tag needs updating has 11,888 images in it, but we really should be wary of throwing out potentially free content. That would actively harm the m:mission. Carcharoth (talk) 10:49, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

I don't want to fragment the disussion at Template talk:PD#Edit request; I had really just posted here as an announcement in the hope of drawing the opinion of knowledgeable people. I have been working my through these images to try to fix the bad licenses. But new ones keep getting added faster than I can clean up old ones. Kelly ^hi! 11:48, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

I worked on that category (and images in general) quite a lot in yesteryears (I seconded the edit request that added the category) and, I must say, it is difficult work. I was not collaborating with anyone, or having anyone check my work, so naturally it was exhausting and stressful.

That said, I think it would be feasible if there were several editors working in collaboration. It would be ideal if there were some way of "tagging" that the images had been reviewed and/or checked by someone else - I don't mean tagging as in adding a template, I mean purely meta-data, stored (for a hypothetical example) on the ToolServer. Then if we could get editors willing to collaborate and learn copious amounts of copyright law (;-)), I think it would go a lot quicker. :-) --Iamunknown 14:06, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

Maybe a better place to bring this up would be the Wikipedia:Village pump. --Apis 00:16, 19 April 2008 (UTC)

Image:User.gif: unintended bias?

Extended discussion moved to Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)/Image:User.gif: unintended bias?. Mr.Z-man 22:04, 19 April 2008 (UTC)

Cooperation with fiction dedicated wiki encyclopedias

Many fiction articles are being created and deleted due to violation of our notability policies. That's a fact, whether one likes it or not. There is however some inefficiency here: there are quite a few wikis out there dedicated to creating encyclopedias on a given fictional series/verse/whatever. Yet while many of them could accept direct cut and paste copies of articles deleted on our project, we don't have an efficient way of finding out that they exist, notifying them that article of interest to them is about to be deleted, and transwikifying the content. This should be remedied somehow. Perhaps we should create a list of such fiction pedias by topic, each linked to a relevant category or main article on Wikipedia, and have some bot process that would update that list with 'this recently AfD/deleted article may be relevant to this project' (this could be possible with a little tweaking of User:AlexNewArtBot, for example). Thoughts? --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk} 17:36, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

I agree, but I think there is already a sytem for that in place. Check out Template:Move to gaming wiki. There is also a wiki dedicated to archiving all the articles that get deleted from Wikipedia, called Deletionpedia. --ErgoSum88 (talk) 21:24, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

If we really wanted to solve the problem we should make our own wikiquote style site for it. en.wikifiction.org or something. I like to edit fiction articles, but I also like to edit non fiction articles. I'm not going to spread my work into other (add supported) wikis, but I do like to edit wikiquote and commons and wouldn't mind doing the same if it was part of the non profict wikimedia foundation. There must be some major reason this isn't done but don't know what it is. - Peregrine Fisher (talk) 22:00, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

I never really got it off the ground, or properly formatted the page, but this idea might fit nicely into WikiProject Transwiki. -- Ned Scott 04:17, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

I've never used it, but I think transwiki is a great idea and wish it were implemented more prominently. It would be so much easier to simply move inappropriate fiction content to another wiki than to keep reverting or deleting extraneous text that some editors are attached to. Fritter (talk) 15:00, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

I think another aspect of this is that many of these fiction wikis are better positioned to provide full information on specific topics than Wikipedia is... for example, Plots. Currently, plots in Wikipedia are like a tug of war between brevity and completeness. A lot of the desire that drives this battle could be sated if our plot guidelines allowed or suggested that the Plot section begin with a hatnote:

"For a more complete description of the plot, see XXXXX at the XXXXXpedia."

The current guidelines for external links would frown on such usage. As long as this was limited to wikis with compatible approaches to Wikipedia, this might be a good result. I have in mind sources like Memory Alpha, Wookiepedia, and similar projects that aim to organize in encyclopedic fashion their area of fiction.--Marcinjeske (talk) 01:00, 20 April 2008 (UTC)

Editorial tags should be restricted to the talk page

I know this subject has come up before but I would like to bring it up again because I think the editorial tags that clutter up the wikipedia detract from its readability and usefulness.

Editorial comments belong on the talk page. They are not content. Furthermore, I think putting these tags on pages violates the essential spirit of the wikipedia which is to contribute. If an editor thinks a page needs "cleanup" they should clean it up, not whine about it with a tag that just clutters up the page even more.

In all honesty you could put "needs references" on practically every single page in the wikipedia. There is always somebody who thinks information is not documented thoroughly enough (you should meet some of my university professors). If an editor thinks an article needs some additional documentation they should spend the 5 hours in the library satisfying their lust for authority instead of click-criticizing other people's articles with inadequacy tags.

There will always be whiners who are never satisfied with an article please make them put their blarny on the talk page and leave the content page for content. John Chamberlain (talk) 21:34, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

I agree, I hate trying to sift through all the "citation needed"s and "this page may not be neutral" tags just to try and read an article. I think it would be better to simply discuss issues on the discussion pages since any of these tags are likely to be discussed anyway. However, I do think they serve a purpose to the reader, altering them to the issues a page may be having at the moment, such as neutrality issues and undocumented facts. But there has to be a better, less intrusive way. --ErgoSum88 (talk) 22:06, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

I have some sympathy for that idea. Unfortunately many editors would rather just mark it article for deletion rather then put appropriate tags on it. 'Needs references' that you give as an example is one of the better tags, some others that are almost impossible to disprove are {{Original research}} or {{Unencyclopedic}}.

It seems the best we can hope for at present time is tags that clearly identify the reason and section involved so that the tag can be later removed with some assurance that the article meets the intention of the editor who added the tag. SunCreator (talk) 22:13, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

What is poor about the tag system is that new or inconsiderate editors ignore the guidelines and remove tags to clean up articles even when the tag still applies while considerate editors who abide by the guidelines leave them, only to have articles they are involved in look messy. SunCreator (talk) 22:36, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

I like to see the tags, because I like to know when I am reading something that isn't a consensus. They're a reminder to readers that Wikipedia is an ongoing process, and no article is ever really finished. I think that's important. Also, I started editing Wikipedia after reading it for a long time, because I thought I could address the problems in the warning tags. If you're just a reader and you see a tag for something you can fix, you think "Hey, I know about this; I can fix it" and you are prompted to become an editor. I can't say my editing is going well at the moment, but I still think the tags are a part of the "anyone can edit" spirit. Life.temp (talk) 22:43, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

Well let's say it again: Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. Unreferenced, unverified content (which if written in any detail is always chock full of errors when actually examined to source) should not be foisted on anyone as proper content. It must not give the appearance of proper content. I think tags should be made bigger and louder: THIS ARTICLE CITES NO SOURCES AND IPSO FACTO SHOULDN'T BE RELIED ON AT ALL! I'm exxaggerating a little but it is crucial we keep these flags flying.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 23:31, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

As an editor is it not better to remove unreferenced or unverified material example here, rather then put in tags that don't identify which bit is unreferenced or unverified anyway. SunCreator (talk) 23:46, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

It depends on the circumstance. If an entire article or section looks like it's probably pretty factual but includes no references, it should be tagged with {{unreferenced}}. If a section is unreferenced and looks suspect or otherwise unhelpful, it should be deleted. If an article is reasonably-cited but there are specific assertions that are uncited and not self-evident, they should be tagged with {{fact}}. Regardless, though, I agree with Fuhgettaboutit that these tags are valuable to the reader (as distinct from the sort of tag that is currently confined to talk pages, which are valuable primarily to editors). Sarcasticidealist (talk) 23:58, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

(to SunCreator) Indeed it is. But you must have done a where's waldo search to find that article. By contrast, I hit the random article button a few times and find Buffalo (drinking game). This is what we are drowning in, not featured articles hit by a drive by editor.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 00:33, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

No search required, high on my watchlist :) I accept your point however, there is a far more rubbish about. Sometimes I wonder if tagging is part of the solution or part of the problem, if the tag doesn't make it clear what is required to fix the article, how is adding the tag actually contributed to it's fixing? Some tags are useful while others in my view are wasteful and counterproductive. SunCreator (talk) 00:49, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

(outdent) I think the use of tagging is less to draw the attention of editors to what needs fixing, and more to draw the attention of the reader to what assertions he/she should or shouldn't be trusting. If they were designed primarily to draw editors' attention to things that needed fixing, then the talk page would be a perfectly appropriate place for them. Since most of them are for the benefit of readers (although that's not true of {{uncategorized}}, {{orphan}}, {{deadend}}, and their ilk), they should stay in the article. Sarcasticidealist (talk) 01:16, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

I should say that tags are useful in both capacities (notifying readers and editors). Even though talk pages are naturally better for describing problems in detail, editors must be somehow drawn to these descriptions first; people generally cruise through articles, not talk pages. Waltham, The Duke of 04:40, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

I am not disputing the usefulness of the tags. I am saying (1) the usefulness of the tags is outweighed by the negative clutter value they have to the majority of readers, and (2) the talk page is a more logical place to put the tag.

FOLLOWUP: I just saw the new "Page Under Construction" tag. Unbelievable. This is exactly what is wrong with the Wikipedia tag system. "Under Construction" notices are a classic example of bad page design and all HTML editing guides emphatically warn amateur web page creators from using "Under Construction" notices, yet here we are putting this clutter on thousands of Wikipedia pages despite years of professional editors warning against it. I realize that the Wikipedia policy board does not have professional editors on it, but seriously they should at least read Strunk & White so they have some clue about good practices. Wikipedia editorial policy seems to be turning into amateur hour. Too many cooks? John Chamberlain (talk) 21:10, 18 April 2008 (UTC)

If you're referring to {{underconstruction}}, it's used in about 150 of Wikipedia's 6,907,422 articles, most of which are undergoing active editing. It's not something I'd worry about. --Carnildo (talk) 02:48, 19 April 2008 (UTC)

If the matter is of the various quality, references, wikify, notability tags that get put on articles and sections, I would argue they are definitely useful. For readers, they mark the content as incomplete and by contrast imply the higher quality of articles which do not feature any tags. They encourage readers to become editors by saying "yeah, you can fix it". For editors, I think it would be safe to say that an editor does not check the talk page unless they already plan to edit the page or are involved in a discussion on that page. The tags serve as flags to grab editors attention. As to the motivation of editors placing the tags - while an editor may notice lack of references or other issues, not every editor is in a position to correct the problem... they use these tags to communicate with other editors, particularly in the early stages of an article where the creators may be active, and to serve as very obvious reminders of where the problem are in the article. They are a vital and useful tool for shuffling through all this information. --Marcinjeske (talk) 01:32, 20 April 2008 (UTC)

False citations

What does one do if there is concern that an editor had made false citations in a potential Featured Article, and has then prevaricated more blatantly in his defense of the citation. (In other words, if there is evidence of both.) Fowler&fowler«Talk» 18:29, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

Bring the citation concerns up on the talk page or at the FAC nomination. If the information cannot be verified, it should be removed from the article. (In order to verify it, you may have to order books through inter library loan or gain copies of journal articles, depending on what type of source it is.) Karanacs (talk) 18:51, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

How do you know it's a false citation? You should start with assuming good faith from the other editor. SunCreator (talk) 19:00, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

The last time I dealt with someone using false citations, I knew they were false because I had the book in question open in front of me, and the page they were citing was on a totally different subject. It's hard to assume good faith when you've got proof that the person is lying to you. --Carnildo (talk) 19:38, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

The book is a little known book unavailable in the West, but I was able to get the content on Google books. Please see Wikpedia rules broken? Regards, Fowler&fowler«Talk» 20:05, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

Be aware with books that you can have the same page saying two different things with different editions. Recommend that edition, year of publication and ISBN is checked. SunCreator (talk) 20:59, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

Well, all the information on the book in various catalogs is about the 1980 edition (one that I have looked at). I have now requested information about this 2001 edition (please see: ISBN for 2001 edition), and am awaiting a response. Regards, Fowler&fowler«Talk» 14:15, 19 April 2008 (UTC)

User Talk Page

I recently proposed the following change to WP:User talk page. Another user disagreed so I have brought it here:
I suggest changing the fact that users may remove warnings to:
Users may remove incorrect warnings instantly, but correct warnings can be deleted after a period of 31 days. It is preferred that a record of blocks be kept but this is not necessary.
Or similar. What does anyone else think? George D. Watson (Dendodge).Talk^Help 22:10, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

Blocks for vandalism should not be removable from a User Talk Page. Such Block notices could function as a criminal record. If that editor again commits vandalism, it should be easy for everyone to know that such an editor is a repeat offender. SMP0328. (talk) 01:00, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

I disagree--the greater good here is letting users have control over their user talk page. Block messages can stay up for the duration of the block, then get removed by the user at their discretion. The custom is that the removal of a warning is an acknowledgement of having read the warning. Darkspots (talk) 01:10, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

Users are allowed to remove warnings from their page. Removing them is considered acknowledgment that they have been read. I don't see any real point in attempting to force users to leave them on the page for an arbitrary amount of time. -- Kesh (talk) 01:12, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

The thing is, as a vandal fighter - I don't have time to check the page history for warnings this month just so I know which level to give them. If somebody has a better proposal, it would be very welcome. George D. Watson (Dendodge).Talk^Help 08:24, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

I would use great care with that statement Dendodge. Saying you do not have time to do what is right is like a judge saying he does not have time to review the applicable law. A slippery slope which leads away from WP core principals. Perhaps a better analogy is police officers who arrest criminals. Yes, they probably could "catch more bad guys" if they didn't have to fill out arrest reports afterwards ... but policework is not only streetwork, it also is officework. I don't think you realize that what you are proposing is like asking suspects to complete their own arrest reports, and if they fail to do so then charge them with the additional crime of not doing your work for you.

It's not all bad news however. What you could do is ask for a bot to be created (for use by all "vandal fighters") that could extract the warning history for you. Bots are good at drudge tasks and they do not require making policy changes or the cooperation of the offenders. -- Low Sea (talk) 16:57, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

Sounds great! If someone could program that (I didn't even understand how to set up Python, so I can't) it'd be perfect! I'll put in a request now. George D. Watson (Dendodge).Talk^Help 17:18, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

When placing warnings, use adequate edit summaries. If you do that, page history is one click away, and gives you a perfectly good date-sorted overview of previous warnings. If you do not use adequate edit summaries, you get what's coming to you. ;-) --Kim Bruning (talk) 17:31, 17 April 2008 (UTC) In fact, you should always use good edit summaries, not just when placing warnings. ;-)

This is just going to hurt people who are here to build an encyclopedia but end up revert warring and getting blocked for 24 hours, but otherwise abide by the rules - now they have to keep the 3RR warnings on their talk page for a month? While the users it is supposed to affect, vandals, are going to continue not caring about any of our rules (having a rule against vandalism sure doesn't do much to stop it) and continue to remove the warnings. The only difference will be that vandal patrollers will have a reason to revert them. Mr.Z-man 17:59, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

I was totally opposed to that, why are you replying to me? :-P --Kim Bruning (talk) 16:03, 18 April 2008 (UTC)

As a matter of fact, Mr Brunning, one does not necessarily suffer by one's own inadequate summaries; although I am not involved in vandal-fighting affairs, it is quite obvious to me that vandals are not the responsibility of specific patrollers, or at least not always. If all could write helpful summaries, that would be good, but not all do, therefore summaries are unreliable. Waltham, The Duke of 10:30, 19 April 2008 (UTC)

My summaries are all the default Twinkle ones. I've put in a request for a user script. ...... Dendodge.Talk^Help 10:52, 19 April 2008 (UTC)

Twinkle is popular and useful, but there is no requirement for all administrators to use it, so I guess some of them don't. As I said, I don't think we cannot rely on everyone's writing good summaries. Waltham, The Duke of 12:01, 19 April 2008 (UTC)

As I said, I've requested a user script, which - if created - would alleviate most of your concerns and allow for the page to stay how it is. ...... Dendodge.Talk^Help 12:07, 19 April 2008 (UTC)

Waltham: So whack the people who don't put nice edit summaries :-) --Kim Bruning (talk) 21:22, 19 April 2008 (UTC) You could even make a nice template for it!

Relevance proposed guideline - terse version

I have made a proposal for a guideline on Wikipedia:Relevance. I have been extensively involved with many attempts to come up with a guideline for this (formerly as User:WikiLen). All attempts have failed to achieve consensus, even as simple as a disambiguation page. This is the first attempt with a terse version -- in the style of WP:IAR. It seems like a reasonably good compromise for all the concerns expressed by editors. For those new to this, a list of issues:

• Pressure exists for a Relevance policy to help solve problems with trivia and in-popular-culture stuff.
• Some assert a Relevance policy is not needed.
• I say, something is needed -- should not be left unsettled; redirects is not a solution.
• Things have been quiet for a few months, but the current redirect to an essay is not right.
• My take: Historically, many things proposed as Relevance policy really belong in a style guideline -- at least for the verbose things. Example: Stay on topic.

Additional talk page comments can be found here. —Len Raymond (talk) 21:23, 19 April 2008 (UTC)

Flagged Revisions

Above at another discussion (sprotect all articles) a user talked about Flagged Revisions. On its page there is very little explication (in lay terms) what that policy or programme will do. Can anyone explain it to me? And is this in use already (the art. was from 07)? And where can we discuss it moreJeanLatore (talk) 22:16, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Flagged revisions, it is not in use, but you can test it at test.wikipedia.org. Prodego ^talk 01:18, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

My understanding from the notes on the Wikipedia:Flagged revisions and the MediaWiki site, the idea of Flagged revisions is that the "outside world" does not see the latest article revision, but the latest revision which has been marked "ok". The idea is that readers who are not logged in will not see any vandalism, because the revision where the vandalism occurred will not get marked "ok".

The question of who gets to mark a revision ok is a bit murky and up for debate (the feature is still not turned on for Wikipedia). On one extreme, any logged in editor will be able to "ok" a revision. At the other, only admins or maybe longtime editors will have that ability. It seems like the initial plan is to "sighting" rights to pretty much any editor with an account and email address. Hope that helps. --Marcinjeske (talk) 05:57, 21 April 2008 (UTC)

UberScience...UberBoring - too prevalent on wikipedia

Okay - Wikipedia wants to be an encyclopaedia that covers everything. But please - can we hold back some on the uberscience spouting forth way too early on too many articles? Science is already the new religion, but please can we stop it overcoming easy reading and easy access to information, which should be an encyclopaedias foremost aim?

Cant the UberScience squad be relegated to a sub-section of article structure? For example: introductory explanatory section, followed by 'The Science' or something like that, so that normal human beings who dont want technicalities and scio-pedantica (yes, i made that term up) shoved down their throats every time we want to casually browse wikipedia? It would make the information far more accessible to a broader range of people.

i find it occurring way too often on wikipedia. And i do mean even on terms which may be considered scientific. It may surprise the scio-pedantics, but some people just want casual, plain english explanations and understandings. They REALLY dont want, or, very importantly, need, to be overloaded with techno-babble in the opening paragraphs and laden with complex diagrams etcetera etcetera in the top third of the page, regardless of its accuracy (how about a simple picture first, complex detail second?). And yes - i do mean even when referring to organic compounds and scientific items.

I know attention to detail is the pet-love of science, but it is possible to retain the attention to detail but in plain english, and then unlease the full force of the scientific mind a little later, when the lay person has already more-than-likely got what they need from the basics.

the structure suggested above allows all the current information to remain, but puts it in a specific section of article structure, meaning people can access information, and be able to read it comfortably and share it with non-scio-pedantics without being overwhelmed with oft-unecessary information.

What say ye all?—Preceding unsigned comment added by The Living Stone (talk • contribs) 00:09, April 18, 2008

• First, science is not a religion. Second, your essay here has very rude language that isn't exactly going to win people over. Finally, you don't actually give any examples of the problem, just vague generalties. If the science is too technical, there are places like the Simple English Wikipedia that make it a lot easier to digest. Wikipedia is supposed to be encyclopedic, so it's going to be detailed, and science articles are rather easy to verify. -- Kesh (talk) 01:24, 18 April 2008 (UTC)

First point taken, though i would not be the first to suggest such a thing. Second point - It wasnt meant to 'win people over', it was meant to make a point, but i have edited out a sentence or two you may have been upset by, since that wasnt my intention - I may be the first to mention this, but im fairly certain im not the first to feel it - perhaps i voice the frustration of many? My point is that 'encyclopaedic' doesnt have to mean 'scientific paper', which is what many wikipedia articles seem to have become. If you had not taken offense, you would have seen that I suggested retaining all content, but altering the structure to make wikipedia more welcoming.

Here are my examples (though my frustration has been accumulating over time over various articles, this is my first comment).

I was explaining to my sister and niece about why chocolate makes her (my niece) hyper and then grumpy. I was explaining about caffeine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caffeine) and theobromine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theobromine) found in chocolate (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chocolate). Lets look at the caffeine example first: Paragraph one follows my complaint above, opening with an off-putting "Caffeine is a bitter white crystalline xanthine alkaloid that acts as a psychoactive stimulant drug and a mild diuretic (speeds up urine production)[2] in humans and other animals." The remainding paragraphs are far more approachable, but my niece (and even my sister), had they been unsupervised, would never have got to them because they would not have even got to the end of the first sentence without assuming the whole article was going to be beyond their reach and going elsewhere. The theobromine article offers very little in the way of approachability when a very nice paragraph could have been written about its history and its effects on, and use by, humans eg centred around the roots of its name as 'food of the gods' and the use of its primary carrier, the cacao/cocoa bean as being actual currency to the ancient mesoamericans because of its constituent drugs and their uses of it, and the following uses of it around the world. The chocolate article is handled much more approachably, simply because scio-speak has been kept managed, but it does not give enough detail on its primary components which make chocolate what it is - namely caffeine and theobromine. Just because these are 'drugs' it doesnt mean they need to be written about as science papers.

My intention was not to cause offense, but to raise what i feel is a highly relevant point - If wikipedia is going to come up first-page on most search engines for most subjects, shouldnt approachability be priority? There is no loss of quality or content with this, only a careful attention to structure. Lets look at the caffeine opening sentence again - what does that actually tell us? Its bitter. its white. Its a drug. crystalline-xanthine-alkaloid-diuretic are not informative terms to the vast majority of people, despite scientific accuracy, and instead of informing, they put off. Caffeine is a bitter white drug ...discovered by (the following sentence leading in). There is no loss of basic infomation, even 'psychoactive and 'diuretic' could be left in for extra detail, but that information is enough for the vast majority of enquirers, along with the remainder of the article. The scientific technical terms only inform the minority of searchers, and most of them already have alternative resources where this information is readily avaialable - non-scientists do not. All I am suggesting is that instead of getting first-dibs on the article, the technicalities should be put in a technical sub-section. All enquirers would have access to exactly the same information, is just that no-one would be put off, whereas just now, i am sure they are. These articles are just small examples, but they are not isolated, just prevalent in my attention. i am happy to return here with a vaster list if its required, but the only point im suggesting is one of structural re-consideration for editorial guidelines. --The Living Stone (talk) 02:04, 18 April 2008 (UTC)

I appreciate where you are coming from. Unfortunately, one resource cannot be all things to all people. If you look at Encyclopedia Britannica for example, they have at least 6 levels of encyclopedia products, covering people from 5 or 6 years of age up through postgraduate level. Wikipedia does the same. We start with Simple English Wikipedia. We then have some Introductory articles; still very few, but we are working on it (see [17] andWikipedia:Make technical articles accessible). Then WP:LEADs are supposed to be more accessible. Then the main body of the Wikipedia general articles, and finally the LEADs and bodies of the more detailed and sophisticated Wikipedia articles on more narrow topics. We do not have as many levels yet as EB, and we have a long way to go before we are as organized, but people are aware of the problem and are trying to slowly address it with a limited number of volunteer resources. Also, I might point out that even though I and some of my colleagues believe in accessiblity, I cannot "dictate" this; I have to fight for it. It can be a viscious bruising brutal fight to make articles accessible, and I do not always win. The way to make progress in this area? Come and help us.--Filll (talk) 02:23, 18 April 2008 (UTC)

It might be appropriate to set an arbitrary target "grade level" to the introduction of a technical article. There isn't, as far as I know, a statement on the "wikipedia is not a..." involving textbooks, but many of the articles are written in that fashion. "Plain Language" is very important, because if it can only be understood by someone who already knows it, you might as well not write it. For the record, science can be a religion (it has all the dogma and rituals) or a process. It might be worthwhile to do a project on "famous experiments" that show why we believe various scientific theories, rather than simply stating them as dogma.Somedumbyankee (talk) 17:45, 18 April 2008 (UTC)

Well, the idea is that anything you might not know you can easily discover by simply clicking it (all those technical terms are links). So as long as it is readable... Prodego ^talk 21:15, 19 April 2008 (UTC)

Hmmmm... perhaps a sister project directed at kids? Same stuff, only written in more more approachable language? Wiki-kids or something? Blueboar (talk) 00:45, 20 April 2008 (UTC)

Well we already mentioned the simple English wikipedia. Also, I wouldn't recommend you let your niece use wikipedia unsupervised. While I'm not sure of her age, be aware that there are a lot of contents that might be shocking to her, for example we cover the various horrific things humans have done to each other in a great amount of detail. Finally be aware that as anyone can edit wikipedia, they can easily add things you may consider inappropriate even to an innocous article like caffein. Wikipedia English is unlikely to ever be suitable for the unsupervised use of kids. Nil Einne (talk) 13:27, 20 April 2008 (UTC)

I am not sure it is realistic to say that Nil. While in theory monitoring children while they are on Wikipedia is great, Wikipedia tends to be at the very top of search results, so you would really need to monitor all the time. People don't tend to browse through Wikipedia, they just visit one page, so that we have some inappropriate content isn't a problem unless you look for it. Regardless, there are far worse things on the internet then are on Wikipedia, so watching caffeine for possible vandalism should be the least of ones worries. Prodego ^talk 13:47, 20 April 2008 (UTC)

I'm not a parent or a psychologist, but I would say monitoring all the time is required, particularly for young children (it's also what I always here whenever people do reports on kids internet usage). Maybe not physical monitoring but at least with well set up software. Note also that monitoring doesn't necessarily mean you have to be there all the time, but could include other stuff like ensuring you're available if your child has questions, teaching your child how to use the internet to find stuff (which will likely include, depending on the age, using sources better suited for their level then wikipedia), and perhaps having a look through what your child has been doing after the fact and talking to them if there is something that concerns you. I don't exactly see how the Google position affects anything, a lot of sites worse then wikipedia are going to show up near the top of searches and in any case, unless you teach your kid to only look at the first page of a search page it's most irrelevant, don't assume your kid is not going to come across something accidentally. Then of course there are things like MySpace, forums and chat rooms. Also, kids tend to be a lot smarter then adults realise, always very curious and a lot more comfortable and used to technology (including searching and links), you'd be wrong to assume they are not going to come across something that they might not yet be ready to deal with even if they start off from caffeine (or whatever). Note that other then stuff like the holocaust, wars, slavery etc, there are a lot of other things like health related stuff which a child may have difficult dealing with on their own. So I stick by my claim, wikipedia (the website) is by definition not suitable for the unsupervised use by young kids, and there are far worse problems then their inability to understand a lot of the stuff we write. Sure in the future we may have stuff like checked revisions, restricted content etc, but this never going to be the main part of wikipedia. Nil Einne (talk) 14:43, 20 April 2008 (UTC)

Sure, I am just saying the Internet as a whole is not suitable for unsupervised use, I wouldn't focus in on Wikipedia. Prodego ^talk 01:09, 21 April 2008 (UTC)

Flagging edits for COPYVIO, BLPVIO, etc.

I would like to be able to flag individual individual edits for concealment by administrators. In particular, things which are edit-analogs to legally-required WP:SPEEDY criteria, including:

• A10/disparagement, particularly in BLP
• A12/confirmed or obvious copyvio

Plus G7/Author requests deletion but only if the content could put the author in personal or legal jeopardy, e.g. "oops I accidentally posted my social security number."

Please consider adding this feature to Wikipedia. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs)/(e-mail) 02:20, 20 April 2008 (UTC)

For such an edit to be removed, it needs to be reverted as quickly as possible, then see WP:OVERSIGHT. --Random832 (contribs) 02:30, 20 April 2008 (UTC)

Ah, I was under the impression that there were two levels of hiding an edit: one level that admins could see but non-admins could not, and the second oversight level. My mistake. In any case, a one-button "this needs hiding" would be helpful. I would expect due to the sheer use an easy-to-use button would get, it would not be acted upon unless it was first vetted by an admin and/or several people clicked on the same button. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs)/(e-mail) 03:02, 20 April 2008 (UTC)

Actually there are two levels of hiding IIRC. Basically, an admin (or sysop?) can delete an edit/revision. The deletion log will show the edits were deleted (to anyone) and admins can undelete the deletions. For proper removal we usually prefer oversight in which case nothing will show to anyone that something was deleted. Nil Einne (talk) 13:49, 20 April 2008 (UTC)

Sometime in the near(?) future the experimental Special:Revisiondelete, which is precisely what this is, will go live (don't ask me, I can't tell). MER-C 03:49, 20 April 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Canadian Wikipedians' notice board/Style guide no longer marked as a guideline

Wikipedia:Canadian Wikipedians' notice board/Style guide (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs) has been edited so that it is no longer marked as a guideline. It was previously marked as a guideline. This is an automated notice of the change (more information). -- VeblenBot (talk) 18:50, 20 April 2008 (UTC)

Intelligent Design equated to Creationism - point of view or Wiki-principle?

I'm not interested in opening the debate, just to understand if it has been closed. I have been told that equating intelligent design with creationism is not a point of view but a principle of the Wikipedia somehow related to the WP:NPOV policy. Was this ever declared as a principle. And if so, where?

Who or what on the Wikipedia has the power to declare such applications of policy as principle? patsw (talk) 01:05, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

What you were told is not that equating intelligent design with creationism was a principle of Wikipedia, but that reflecting "overwhelming support" by the scientific community in articles was a principle of Wikipedia, which indeed it is (per Wikipedia:NPOV/FAQ#Pseudoscience). Sarcasticidealist (talk) 01:08, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

Oh, I think I've found the source of your confusion: when Filll referred to "overwhelming support", he didn't mean the overwhelming support of Wikipedia editors, but rather of the scientific community. Sarcasticidealist (talk) 01:11, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

Since Wikipedia:NPOV/FAQ#Pseudoscience does not mention either, its application to intelligent design and creationism would need to argued not merely asserted as well as assigned into one of those four categories for a start. The size of the scientific community not dismissing intelligent design as pseudoscience is another topic.

Sarcasticidealist, are you agreeing with me that it is not a Wikipedia principle to equate intelligent design with creationism? For the sake of argument, both may be fringe science, but are they identical fringes? patsw (talk) 01:53, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

I think you're creating a false dichotomy: it is a policy that substantial deference should be given should be given to academic consensus. It is alleged (and appears to me to be well-supported, although I'm outside my area of expertise, here) that scientific consensus holds that intelligent design is creationism. Therefore, it is an application of policy that Wikipedia should treat one as the other, while allowing for an explanation of dissenting views. Sarcasticidealist (talk) 02:01, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

That holding is a rhetorical position made in op-ed and other works of advocacy for Darwinism. I would grant the scientific consensus rejects intelligent design, but not that the consensus holds it is identical in a scientific sense to creationism. I think you are creating a false conflation: intelligent design is false, creationism is false, therefore intelligent design is identical to creationism. Even its critics refute intelligent design and creationism differently. patsw (talk) 02:27, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

Go argue that elsewhere. All I'm saying is that if scientific consensus holds this (and Filll's explanation on this appears quite credible to me, although again, I'm outside my area of expertise), then Wikipedia should treat the subjects as being identical, while acknowledging and explaining minority POV. Sarcasticidealist (talk) 02:30, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

By far the overwhelming majority of the experts in this area acknowledge that intelligent design=creationism. This covers a wide range of experts, from both the creationist and the mainstream scientific and academic communities, and is well supported by multiple peer-reviewed publications, as well as the opinion of a US federal court. It is also supported by multiple primary sources from the intelligent design community itself, including the Wedge document and public pronouncements of Philip E. Johnson and others. So in those cases, NPOV states that we represent the views in proportion to their prominence. The only significant group that claims intelligent design is not creationism is a small lobbying group that does so for reasons to try to trick the US legal system, and attempt to deceive the US judiciary, but only when they make statements for public consumption, not when they are trying to appeal to their base and to raise money. So far this strategy has not worked, and appears to be getting abandoned. The Expelled movie is an example of this strategy being partly abandoned because they have been associating intelligent design with the existence of God.--Filll (talk) 02:15, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

Is the short version that anyone making a distinction between intelligent design and creationism attempting to deceive and misrepresenting either intelligent design or creationism? Is your evaluation of their intent part of the science of which you speak as well? patsw (talk) 02:55, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

Sorry I have no idea what you are talking about. It is Wikipedia policy to go with the views in proportion to their prominence. It is clear that intelligent design is creationism in reference after reference, source after source, in the scientific literature, in the academic literature, in peer-reviewed publications, in assorted intelligent design documents, in the decisions of a US federal court and in the creationism literature. You want me to bury you with references? This is beyond silly. If you want to argue the contrary, get yourself a few million dollars together and win a lawsuit stating the contrary. Then, Wikipedia will change how they represent this. But this argument is not one for Wikipedia until that point. We report what is found in the most reliable sources, in proportion to the prominence of each view, and in the most reliable sources, without a doubt, intelligent design is creationism.

The only people that claim the opposite are those who claim intelligent design is not creationism for legal and political purposes on Monday, and then claim the opposite Tuesday when they are talking to a religious body or trying to raise money. All their arguments and positions are indistinguishable from those of creationists. And then on Wednesday, an internal document from these same people appears that shows that privately, intelligent design is not distinguished from creationism. And then they lose a court fight where one of the conclusions of the court is that they are lying when they claim intelligent design is not creationism. So they are not particularly credible on this issue. So, by Wikipedia policy, it is very clear what should be done.

You can either try to change Wikipedia policy, or you can try to win a court battle and get the next court to reverse the previous court decision. Or you can just accept the status quo.--Filll (talk) 15:15, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

I basically agree with this, but I think one issue is a tendency to almost pounce on this issue, without adequately explaining why it matters (which is as Filll suggests almost entirely for political and legal reasons, not having to do with science). That much, I think, is pretty well accepted. However, it doesn't make a lot of sense to simply state as fact that they're the same, if only because the average reader won't know what that means. If we're raising the issue, I think the right approach is to explain that this is generally regarded as a religious theory, even though its proponents sometimes suggest otherwise, or to explain whatever other issues with the comparison may arise. Mackan79 (talk) 02:46, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

Also, we should be clear that ID is not equal to creationism in the strict sense, but rather is one instance of it. Thus, "ID is (a form of) creationsim" is true, but "creationism is ID" is not. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 15:34, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

No, ID is not a form of creationism. Creationism is shorthand for Biblical Creationism, the belief that the Genesis account of creation is how it really happened. ID says nothing about that at all. ID simply says that the universe (or some of the things in it) show signs of having been designed. ID is compatible with creationism (at least old earth creationism), but it is not creationism. ID is also compatible with evolution, but it is not evolution. NCdave (talk) 03:27, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

WP:NPOV/FAQ#Pseudoscience is not applicable, because ID is not pseudoscience, according to Wikipedia's definition. Here's the relevant section from Wikipedia's official policy:

The ArbCom ruled that the following should generally not be characterized as pseudoscience:

• Questionable science: "Theories which have a substantial following, such as psychoanalysis, but which some critics allege to be pseudoscience, may contain information to that effect, but generally should not be so characterized."
• Alternative theoretical formulations: "Alternative theoretical formulations which have a following within the scientific community are not pseudoscience, but part of the scientific process."

It is thus incorrect to characterize ID as pseudoscience in Wikipedia articles, and incorrect to apply policies that are based on such a characterization. We all know that ID has a following[18][19] within the scientific community. It matters not whether that following is tiny or large, for the purpose of Wikipedia's definition of "pseudoscience." The fact that ID has a following in the scientific community means that means it is not pseudoscience. NCdave (talk) 03:57, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

Er... You seem to have missed part of the paragraph you are quoting 'Theories which have a substantial following'. ID is not one of these (it does not have a substanial following). It is also not an alternative theoretical formulation nor part of the scientific process, as agreed by nearly all scientists. (Given that there has only been 1? peer reviewed article, more or less completely rejected, which didn't even get properly peer reviewed, supporting ID, it doesn't take a genuis to figure this out) Therefore, yes, it is a pseudoscience. Nil Einne (talk) 20:53, 21 April 2008 (UTC)

Dr. Ronald Numbers is an agnostic, a very prominent critic of ID, a past president of the History of Science Society, and the author of the most widely cited history of creationism (which Salon magazine calls "probably the most definitive history of anti-evolutionism"). But he says that the claim that ID is creationism "doesn't hold a lot of water." Here's what he told Salon:

Salon: More recently, we've had the intelligent design movement. I know some people just see this as a new version of creationism, stripping away all the talk about God and religion so you can teach it in the schools. Is that true?

Dr. Numbers: There's a little bit of evidence to support that. But I think that both demographically and intellectually, it doesn't hold a lot of water. The intelligent design leaders are people, by and large, who do not believe in young earth creationism.[20] NCdave (talk) 04:05, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

I intended this to be a meta-discussion that equating intelligent design with creationism is not a point of view but a principle of the Wikipedia somehow related to the WP:NPOV policy. I'm ready to conclude that for some editors big science is a non-arguable force majure that gets deployed at the discretion of editors. I disagree with it, of course, but I see the design behind it as clever means of promoting a point of view to the exclusion of others. I concede. patsw (talk) 04:19, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

Comment. The village pump is not really the place for this kind of discourse. Anyone is welcome to discuss their issues on the article's talk page. If people cannot peacefully reach an agreement, there are people who can help. If anyone intends to stump in favor of one POV or another, there are other places for that. Vassyana (talk) 04:31, 17 April 2008 (UTC)